“I have it from a man I’ve known ever since I came to New York. He’s reliable.”
“But it’s so unlike Bob Laird.”
“Why is it unlike him?” he challenged with a tinge of impatience. “Hasn’t he been playing about lately with the Junior Masters?”
“Do you happen to know,” she replied quietly, “that Junior and Bob Laird were classmates and clubmates at college, and that they probably always have called each other by their first names?”
“No. Have you ever heard them?” Angry regret beset him the instant the question had passed his lips. If she replied in the affirmative—
“No; I’ve never happened to hear them,” she admitted; and he breathed more freely.
“Then my evidence is certainly more direct than yours,” he pointed out.
“Ban; that charge once made public is going to be unanswerable, isn’t it? Just because the thing itself is so cheap and petty?”
“Yes. You’ve got the true journalistic sense, Io.”
“Then there’s the more reason why you shouldn’t print it unless you know it to be true.”