ONFROY
Oh, you fish! You eel! Worthy of her? She isn’t worthy to carry your coat! You’re Addington Agnus, the man who won the Nobel prize—try to remember the name—Addington Agnus.
AGNUS
You’ve never loved, Noel—
ONFROY
A dozen times. And if Olive made me dissatisfied tomorrow, I might love a dozen times more before I got satisfied again. Marriage made me. It’ll ruin you. Before I married, I was a pot-boiling portrait-painter. Now I’m the great Noel Onfroy, the American Velasquez. Love should serve genius. It’s more important for me to paint good pictures than to be foolish for six months or a year with some woman who doesn’t know a Michael Angelo from a Christy chromo—or who thinks Gibson is a great artist. Now, Fanny doesn’t know the difference between your work and that of some tame rabbit in a hutch discovering cheaper ways of tanning leather and dyeing cheese-cloth—
AGNUS
Olive didn’t know anything about art when you met her.
ONFROY
No, but I soon made her learn. I told her if she didn’t I wouldn’t marry her. And I didn’t, either, until she spent a year in one of the Julian studios learning how little she was and how big art was.—You ought to send Fanny to a School of Science before you marry her—