“Don’t! I can’t stand this—I told you once before I couldn’t stand it.”
“How can I help it? I told you a man is hard to manage.”
“You’re the hardest to manage I ever saw. What can I do with you? I want to be as good a scout as I can—I don’t really want to take money away from blind babies, nor love’n affection from idiot Johnnies. I don’t want you at all, and you mustn’t want anything to do with me at all. Do you suppose it’s easy for me to say that? Why don’t I let you make a fool of yourself the way they all do? Search me—I don’t know! Listen—have you ever doped this thing out all the way down the line? What’s in your mind—what would you like to do?—what would you like to have me do?”
“I never thought it out I—I don’t know. I don’t understand this at all. I don’t know why I came here to-night, to see you again.”
“Well, let’s suppose now that I was a single woman, and you were a single man. It isn’t true in your case, and we won’t say anything about mine. Suppose we were both free to do as we liked? How far do you suppose, my friend, that thirty-five cents would go in backing a theatrical company like this, that carries thirty-eight performers, its own sets and its own brass?”
Polly Pendleton, dependable always to do the unexpected, was not laughing now, but half sobbing, and wiping her eyes on the corner of her skirt.
“I wish’t you wouldn’t do that. Please don’t!” he exclaimed. “I can’t tell you how it hurts me.”
“Well, it’s you that’s done it,” she flared at him over the corner of her ruffles, forgetting a half limb exposed. “Did I ask you to come here? Is it the part of a real man to make it harder for a fellow like me, that’s trying to get on in the world?”
“I don’t reckon I’ve thought of that,” said David Joslin with sudden contrition. “I reckon I was just thinking of my own self. I know the place in my book that covers that. It’s about Adam——”
“Never mind about Adam!” said Polly Pendleton. “Don’t I know! If you were just a case of an average Johnnie that had money and no brains, I’d maybe take you on and jolly well separate you. Such things have happened. But here you are with no money and a lot of brains. Excuse me, my friend, but you don’t seem to just qualify for running a theatrical company. Besides—I like you a lot. I told you that before. But when I sing, ‘You’re the only man for me,’ that’s what I don’t mean—what I never mean. Can’t you understand that? I wish you’d never seen me.”