"What?"
"You," was on the tip of Barb's tongue, but she did not say it. After all, that was for Sylvia to say. She had no means of knowing how Sylvia felt except that vivid memory of the way the other girl's eyes had looked that night on Lover's Leap.
"Happiness, for one thing," she substituted. "Phil Lorrimer, don't you know Sylvia Arden well enough to know the things that money buys are not the real things--the things she cares for. She is willing to play with them while she is waiting. Who wouldn't? I would myself, if I had the chance. But Sylvia never mixes things up. She knows what counts and what doesn't count as well as anybody I know. If you think her having money and your not having it makes the slightest difference to her, you're even stupider than I gave you credit for." Barb had warmed to her subject and did not care if the lash of her tongue did sting a little. She rather thought Phil Lorrimer needed a sting or two. She had forgotten for the moment she had ever been in love with this young man herself. She remembered only she was a woman speaking for her sex in plain round terms.
"You mean Sylvia wants me to ask her to marry her?"
Barb made an impatient gesture.
"I don't know anything about that. That is between you two. What I do know, and what I am trying to tell you, is that the modern woman despises a man just as much for not wanting to ask her to marry him because she has money as she does for wanting to ask her to marry him because she has it. That kind of idea is ancient and exploded and idiotic and disgusting."
Phil threw out his hand in half humorous, half serious protest.
"My word! What an avalanche! So you think it is thoroughly contemptible in me to care whether the woman I marry has a million dollars or not when I haven't a red cent?"
"I do," asserted Barb stoutly. "The money isn't any of your affair, any more than the kind of knife you use on the operating table is hers, or the color of your hair or eyes, for that matter. It just hasn't anything to do with it."
"What is my affair? What is the male end of the bargain, according to the latest approved feministic standards?"