"Well, why should I say I am if I'm not?"
"But you are, Lillian, you know you are."
Lillian became annoyed. "I'm not unhappy," she insisted. "I've got more than you have out of life."
"No," Louise disagreed in sad and pitying accents, "I have Billy."
"But I don't want Billy."
"No, you want Hubert. And have you got him?"
"Certainly I have."
"How do you know you have? How can you be sure that he'll always come back to you from his visits to his family?"
"Oh, shut up, Louise," shouted Billy. "You're a God-damned idiot. These people can attend to their own affairs."
"Hubert is mine as much as Billy is yours," Lillian said. "I know he is."
"You don't know it and you can't know it till you two are married."
"You can't keep Billy from leaving you just because he married you."
"No, but I can lose him and still be respectable."
"That's a fool's satisfaction," said Lillian.
"Well, maybe I'm a fool," Louise mused pleasantly, "but I know you're not happy and you never will be till you're able to stop worrying over whether somebody's chasing your automobile or not."
"Listen, let's not talk about it any more, Louise. You'll only get me sore, and we've been good friends."
"That's why I brought the matter up, because we are
