"I hope you don't regret going?"
"Very few plays are as amusing as the audience," she answered thoughtfully. "Oh, I wouldn't have missed it for anything. I wondered what you were like.…" She turned to look at him with leisurely and unsmiling interest. "I expected to find you much younger. How old are you? Twenty-six? Thirty-two! You're ten years older than I am! What in the world have you been doing with yourself?"
"That would take rather a long time to tell!" he laughed.
"I don't expect it would. Life is not measured by days, but by sensations.…"
"Those you experience or those you create?" Eric interrupted.
Barbara turned away and nodded to herself.
"It's like that, is it?" she murmured. "Are you declaring war? If so, you're clever enough to fight with your own weapons instead of picking up the rusty swords of men I've already beaten. You knew little Val Arden, of course? And my cousin Jim Loring? They taught you to call me a 'sensationalist.' Labels are an indolent man's device for guessing what's inside a bottle without tasting."
"They sometimes prevent accidental poisoning."
"If the right labels are on the right bottles. That's what I have to find out. And it's worth an occasional risk.… Sensationalist! I collect new emotions, but you must be bourgeois yourself if you want to épater le bourgeois. Now, you can't have had many emotions, or you wouldn't have written that play. And yet—what were you doing before?" she demanded abruptly.
"I followed the despised calling of a journalist."