“Why not?”
“Why not? Well, I won’t ever be your mistress, and since it was the hope of getting me for your mistress that made you send me out here—you can’t deny that, now, can you?—well, since it was that and I can’t oblige, you don’t suppose I’ll accept your charity?”
“But I tell you I do think you have a fine voice, and so does Gambone. I swear to you he does. This hasn’t been a trick to get you out to Italy, and nothing else; though it would be absurd to pretend that I’d have done what I did for you for any woman with a fine voice.”
“Why couldn’t you have told me there was a price attached? It wasn’t fair of you to let me come out here without knowing that.”
Nancy was on the verge of breaking down; but she knew that if she cried Kenrick would take the opportunity of such weakness to attempt a reconciliation, and she was determined to finish with him for ever to-night.
“I suppose it wasn’t,” he admitted. “But you must remember that I didn’t know you then as I know you now, and perhaps I assumed that you were like most women, for I swear most women would have realised that I was in love.”
“But it’s such a damnable way of being in love!” Nancy exclaimed. “If you loved me, how could you think that I’d pretend such innocence? To make myself more interesting? Well, I suppose if you go through life judging women by your own ideas about them, you would have discovered by now that all of them were frauds.”
“Listen, Nancy,” Kenrick said. “Is it because you don’t love me that you refuse me as a lover? Or is it because of the conventions? Would you marry me, if I could marry you?”
“Do you mean if I weren’t an actress?” she said, blazing.
“No, no,” he replied impatiently. “For God’s sake don’t talk like that. What on earth difference could that conceivably make? I can’t marry you, because I’m married already, and because my wife would die rather than divorce me. But would you marry me?”