“Perhaps he always will say much that he shouldn’t, anyway. But admitting that you have the right to mystify him, and then not to help him, does it seem to you precisely fair that girls who neither go into the marrying game, nor stay out of it, should—”
“Flirt as much as they do—I want to save you the trouble of finding an inoffensive phrase.”
“Perhaps I wasn’t going to be inoffensive. And I might not have chosen the word ‘flirt.’ Flirt doesn’t exactly express the idea. I shouldn’t wish to seem as if I were hunting about for a new title for an old crime,—”
“Crime? You will be quite solemn in a moment. Did you come over here to scold me?”
“I thought this was a talk game. A talk game couldn’t have a motive, could it?”
“Why, yes. It is like a Wagnerian composition. We might have encountered the Didactic Motive.”
“Now you are scolding me. I insist that I am merely the Interested Spectator. Maybe I am a sort of Walking Gentleman in the cast, who, with every wish not to be impertinent, ventures a timid and respectful word with the leading lady in the wings.”
“Should you think the Walking Gentleman had a right to quarrel with the leading lady as to her method of reading the lines?”
“No; but surely he might ask her, humbly, and in a spirit of honest inquiry, what she thought the author meant and whether, to her, the play seemed consistent. Even the Walking Gentleman must be presumed to have certain human impulses. Perhaps he can’t even find out who is the leading lady. Perhaps the girl who seems designed by nature to be the heroine, the girl who, if he were the Hero and not the Walking Gentleman, would make his duty clear, betrays a singular indifference to the Hero, the Hero’s understudy, and all the rest of them.”
“Then you have come over here with a view to classifying me?”