Page:Glitter (1926).pdf/192

ding—a sure indication that he was puzzled and wary and not a little disturbed. Eunice, unwatched, watched him with telltale eyes. Once she made a tiny half-gesture toward him . . . then drew back in haste and locked her fingers together in her lap.

"Jock," she began, "did you know theah's a lot of scandal around about—us?"

"Yes. Asinine, isn't it?" said Jock. Impelled by a second thought, he brought his chin up with a jerk and examined her. "Is that what's got you so sunk?"

Even as he asked, he read his answer. Eunice's lips were trembling. "Oh, listen!" he went on. "Don't let a thing like that smack you down!" The fact that he privately shared her distress made him only the more vociferous in refutation, and he said aloud and with emphasis all the things he had long been telling himself by way of anaesthetic. "Why, it doesn't amount to five cents' worth of birdseed! It's beneath our notice, absolutely! You ought to read Schopenhauer, Eunice. 'To lay great value on what other people say of you is to do them too much honor.'"

Eunice was pressing a ball of handkerchief against her mouth, and now she spoke through it thickly. "It's all very well to philosophize—you'ah a man, and men don't mind things like that—they don't have to mind, because nobody cahes what they do. But it's a whole lot different with a girl like me—" She raised the handkerchief to her eyes, and her concluding sentence came from her freed lips with a somehow staggering distinctness. "They won't speak to me on the street any moah——"

"Who won't? Who do you mean, 'they'?"

"Some women."

"Oh, of course, women! But who?"

"Professors' wives, and—people like that."