Her laugh tinkled in the telephone. "I wish we could," she said. "I knew you let yourself in for it the first time--but now you're hooked and you _have_ to come." So he went. On later occasions it was more flattering than satisfying to him that the beautiful Mrs. Holbury should drop so promptly into a sort of easy intimacy and treat him almost from the start with a proprietary manner. It soon became an embarrassment of riches. Stuart was thinking of himself as a woman-hater, these days, and he held a normal dislike for wagging tongues. Holbury, too, who was reputed to be of jealous tendency, seemed to regard him unfavorably and took no great pains to affect cordiality. One day Wayne dropped, coatless, into Farquaharson's room and grinned as he tossed a magazine down on the table. "_Sic fama est_" was his comment, and Stuart picked up the sheet which his visitor indicated with a jerk of the thumb. The magazine was a weekly devoted ostensibly to the doings of smart society, but its real distinction lay in its innuendo and its genius for sailing so close to the wind of libel that those who moved in the rarified air of exclusiveness read it with a delicious and shuddering mingling of anticipation and dread. Its method was to use no names in the more daring paragraphs, but for the key to the spicy, one had only to refer back. The preceding item always contained names which applied to both. Stuart found his name and that of Mrs. Holbury listed in an account of some entertainment--and below that: "A young Southerner, recently arrived and somewhat lionized, is whispered to be complicating the already uneven balance of domesticity in the home of a couple whose status in society antedates his own. This gallant has all the attractiveness of one untouched with ennui. He rides like a centaur, talks like a diplomat and flatters as only a Virginian or an Irishman can flatter. The same whisper has it that the husband suffers in the parallel." Farquaharson's face darkened and he reached for his discarded coat. "Hold on; you have company," suggested Wayne placatingly. "Where do you think you're going in such hot haste?" Stuart was standing with his feet well apart and his mouth set in a stern line. "Wayne," he said with a crisp and ominous decisiveness, "I've never slandered any man intentionally--and I require the same decency of treatment from others." "Go easy there. Ride wide! Ride wide!" cautioned the visitor. "That little slander is mild compared with many others in the same pages. Are the rest of them rushing to the office to cane the editors? They are not, my son. Believe me, they are not." "They should be. Submission only encourages a scoundrel."