“I beg her pardon, but I don’t know her from Eve.”
Mame had a feeling that she had struck a concealed rock. “Old Man Waterson would have, anyway,” she said; and with a royal gesture she indicated her own card, now lying on the editorial blotting pad.
Digby Judson took up the card and laughed. Mame was determined not to be sensitive, she simply could not afford to be, but that laugh somehow jarred her nerves. “Cowbarn Independent.” He gave her a comic look from the extreme corner of a bleared eye. “Holy Jones!”
Mame’s heart sank. It was New York over again. This guy was not quite so brusque, but he had the same sneer in his manner. A sick feeling came upon her that she was up against it.
“Cowbarn Independent! I don’t think you’ll be able to get away with that.”
It was almost like casting an aspersion upon Mame’s parents. Natural pugnacity leaped to her eyes. In fact it was as much as she could do to prevent it from jumping off the end of her tongue. “A lot you know about it,” she yearned to say, but prudently didn’t.
The editor of High Life toyed with the card and drew a mock serious sigh for which Mame could have slain him. “When did you arrive in this country, Miss Du Rance?”
“I landed Liverpool yesterday morning.”
“And may I ask what you propose to do now you’ve landed?”
For all the grim depth of her conviction that she could not afford to be thin-skinned, she resented the subtle impertinence of this catechism. Yes, it was New York over again. New York had advised her to cut out the Cowbarn and already she rather wished she had. But she had figured it out that London being a foreign city would not guess the sort of burg her home town was.