"Perhaps I do, but I didn't know it had spread as far as here," he sighed.
"Well, you oughtn't to do it; and she oughtn't either," Sybil declared.
Eric gazed long into the fire without answering. How on earth had they come to discuss Babs? He had been dreaming with wistful contentment of simpler, less embarrassed times when at this hour a red-faced nurse would enter and carry him, sleepily protesting, to bed. Sybil had somehow forced the conversation, they had argued—and his father and mother had listened without taking part, thereby ranging themselves on Sybil's side or at least admitting that she was telling them nothing new.… Sybil was a tigress for loyalty! Ever since she had decided that he was to marry Agnes, she would have mauled and clawed any other woman who got in the way. And when that woman trifled with the devotion of a Lane and made a fool of one of the sacred family … No sister ever imagined that a man could take care of himself. After all, who had suffered by his tragic intimacy with Barbara?
"As if I'd murdered her." What was Babs doing now?
He looked at his watch and pulled himself, stretching and yawning, to his feet.
"I shall go to sleep if I stay here," he said. "Is any one going to dress?"
Twenty minutes later, when he came out of his bath, Lady Lane was sitting in his bedroom.
"I didn't shew you Geoff's last letter," she said. "You'll see he says something about 'The Bomb-Shell'; one of his friends has been to see it and liked it very much."
Eric propped the letter against his looking-glass, as he began to dress.
"I say, have people down here really been marrying me off?" he asked.