"I'm meeting it on every hand."
"But, if I don't mind, why should you?" she asked.
"Well, I do mind. I don't like you to be 'talked about.' And I don't care to have people saying that I'm getting you 'talked about,'" he added with heat. "You must try to look at this from a man's point of view. If you were my sister, and some man who had no intention of marrying you, some man whom you had no intention of marrying——"
"You've never asked me," she interrupted.
Eric was shocked into silence. When he was fighting for her reputation, she was once more the coquette as he remembered her at their first meeting.
"I've thought this over, Babs, from every point of view," he went on, with an effort keeping his temper under her look of slightly bored amusement. "There are three ways out of the difficulty; the first is what certain people think the most obvious—that we should make the story true; the second is that we should contradict it publicly—it's the easiest thing in the world to do—and the third is that we should give up seeing each other."
He stood up with the pretence of warming his hands and fidgeted restlessly by the fire. Barbara had lost her expression of amusement and was honestly puzzled that he should make so great a pother about a piece of idle gossip.
They remained without speaking until a maid entered to announce dinner.
"I'm sorry you've been worried," she said gently. "For once it really wasn't my fault.… I suppose I'm hardened to this sort of thing. Why don't you just not worry? And give me dinner, because I'm very hungry."
"I can't leave it like that," said Eric, as he accompanied her to the dining-room. "A plain statement in the press——"