“I haven’t!” she whispered, so fiercely that an old gentleman nearby almost spilled his coffee.
“Hush, Venice!”
“But I haven’t been to any doctor——”
“Well, then,” said I wisely, “in that case, of course, I don’t see——”
“Oh, you don’t!” she whispered with her fine, savage impatience. “I tell you, my child, that I can’t—I just feel that I can’t, in my bones I feel it, that I’ll never, never, never!” And she put a cloud of smoke between us to make her smile look plausible, but through the smoke her eyes looked as though they were holding back a pain.
“Venice, darling,” I pleaded, “I’m not old enough to deal with an emergency like this. What you need is a man of Hilary’s years to turn you over and smack you and tell you that as long as you’re such a child you don’t deserve to have one——”
“I’m so miserable,” she said.
“But it’s absurd, Venice! I mean, it’s just nerves, you can’t possibly know——”
“Do you actually think,” she grabbed a cigarette fiercely from my case, “that I’ve got to go to some dud doctor and have him poking about all over me before I know what’s me! Of course I can know, and I do know, and it’s a shame, and I daren’t tell Napier....”
“You better hadn’t, on such insufficient evidence. I know what I’d do.”