‘Your Place Or Mine?’ he echoed. ‘I suppose that tells me all I need to know about the kind of sleazy entertainment you think suitable for a sheltered young girl.’

‘Rubbish,’ Maggie said firmly. ‘The title is misleading. It isn’t sleazy at all-just a little bit naughty, but basically innocent.’

‘Indeed?’ Don Sebastian snatched up a newspaper he had been reading to pass the time, and pointed to an advertisement for the show they had just seen. ‘Outrageous,’ he quoted. ‘Titillating! Don’t take your grandmother!’

Maggie struggled to stop her lips twitching, and failed.

‘I am amusing you?’ Don Sebastian asked in a warning voice.

‘Yes, frankly, you are. If you knew anything about theatre advertising-which you clearly don’t-you’d realise that this kind of publicity is deliberately angled to make the public think a show more shocking than it is. “Don’t take your grandmother,” really means that even your grandmother wouldn’t be shocked. My own grandmother would have loved it.’

‘I can well believe that.’

‘Meaning? Meaning?’

‘Do you wish me to spell it out?’

‘Not unless you enjoy making yourself unpleasant, which I’m beginning to think you do. What a fuss about nothing! Catalina is young, pretty. She ought to be out dancing with friends of her own age, and what do you offer her? Julius Caesar, for pity’s sake! Men in nighties and little skirts, with knobbles on their knees.’

‘Since you didn’t see the performance you are hardly equipped to comment on their knees,’ he snapped.

‘I’ll bet they were knobbly, though. A sheltered girl like Catalina would probably have been shocked at the sight.’

But humour was wasted on this man. His eyes had narrowed in a way that some people might have found intimidating, but Maggie was past caring. She had never met anyone who made her so angry so quickly.

At last he said, ‘You have your values and I have mine. They seem to be entirely different. I blame myself for hiring your services without checking you out first.’