“A beautiful woman that does not love her husband always loves another man.”
“Or is willing to be loved by the first man that happens to have no other affair on hand.”
“You have said that you like me.”
“I didn’t say I loved you!”
“I’d make you!”
“Oh!” with a deep contempt he was incapable of understanding, “you couldn’t. But tell me another thing; I’m very curious. Has it never occurred to you that a woman must be wooed, that it is somewhat necessary to arouse sentiment and feeling in her before she is willing to advance one step? Why, you and your kind demand her off-hand in a way that is positively funny. What has become of all the old traditions?”
“Oh, bother,” he said. “Life is too short to waste time on old-fashioned nonsense. If a man wants a woman he says so, and if she’s sensible and likes him she meets him half way. Men and women of the world know what they want.”
“That is all there is to love then? It no longer means anything else whatever?”
“Oh—you are all wrong. If you were not a spiritual woman I wouldn’t cross the room to win you. One can buy the other sort. It is your spirituality, your intellectuality, that fascinates me as much as your beauty.”
“What do you know about spirituality?” she said contemptuously. “I don’t like to hear you speak the word. You desecrate it.”