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After doing their best to spoil one another for nearly ten months, Eve and Jeremy had their first pitched battle in Rome one tearful April morning....

“In other words,” said the former silkily, “I can’t carry my liquor.”

“I never said or suggested such a thing. For all I know, you could drink me under the table.”

“Then what’s the point of your protest?”

Short-skirted, perched upright on a table, her knees crossed, one admirable leg slowly swinging, her beautiful fingers drumming deliberately upon the table’s edge, Eve was superb. If her wonderful hair had been about her shoulders, she might have sat to a Greuze and furnished gaping posterity with a new ideal.

Jeremy swallowed.

“I think it’s a pity,” he said, “deliberately to put off what so very few women have.”

“What’s that?”

“Your ladyship.”

Eve raised her brown eyes to heaven.

“Because I drink two cocktails instead of one——”

“It’s tough,” said Jeremy. “It’s a tough thing to do. A woman’s supposed to drink, not because she likes it, but because it’s the fashion or because she needs bucking up. Very well. It’s the fashion to drink a cocktail before your dinner. To that fashion women subscribe—many, perhaps, cheerfully, but that’s their business. If they make a meal of it—ask for a second helping—the assumption or fiction that they’re following a fashion is gone and they’re merely advertising an appetite which isn’t particularly becoming to a man, but actually degrades a woman whoever she is.”