A warm, impulsive nature, rich in high qualities and puny faults, made her a wife to be very proud of, to love to distraction and occasionally to oppose. . . .
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.”
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.
“I think it’s a pity,” he said, “deliberately to put off what so very few women have.”
“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.”
“I’m much obliged,” said Eve. “‘Tough’ and ‘degraded.’ I am a topper, aren’t I? I suppose you realize that this is 1930.”
“If you mean I’m old-fashioned, I admit it. I don’t like to see a girl drink. But that’s beside the point. I mayn’t like the fashion, but I don’t shout about it. You can’t curse anyone for toeing the line. But I think it’s a thousand pities to overstep it.”
Eve smote upon the table with the flat of her pretty hand.
“You don’t seem able to see,” she cried, “that you’re blowing a whole gale about nothing at all—_nothing_. Because there’s a cocktail going spare and I’m fool enough to give it a home, d’you seriously suggest that I shall be branded as a sot? One swallow doesn’t make a drunkard.”