“Not the real, romantic, burning, suicidal love your sonnets used to breathe.”
“Then you do not know what love is.”
“Do you?”
“You should know whether I do or not.”
“Should I? Then I conclude that you do not. You are growing stout. Your dress is not in the least neglected. I am certain you enjoy life thoroughly. No, you have never known love in all its novelistic-poetic outrageousness. That respectable old passion is a myth.”
“You look for signs that only children shew. When an oak dies, it does not wither and fall at once as a sapling does. Perhaps you will one day know what it is to love.”
“Perhaps so.”
“In any case, you will be able to boast of having inspired the passion.”
“I hope so—at least, I mean that it is all nonsense. Do look at that vegetable lobster of a thing, that cactus.”
“In order to set off its ugliness properly, you should see yourself against the background of palms, with that great fan-like leaf for a halo, and——”