“That we are different, thank God! is a reason for and not against.”
400“No, no; not when it’s such a huge difference. We’re like–a bird and a fish.”
“Don’t call me a fish. I object.”
“We don’t think the same about hardly anything.”
“But we feel alike on everything of importance.”
“There’s hardly a thing I do that’s quite right as you see it. No, don’t take the trouble to contradict me; let me do the talking for a minute. You’re so critical and so conventional and so correct! No matter how much you say you aren’t, you are. And while we’re like this I don’t have to care. I rather enjoy shocking you. And while I’m none of your business, you don’t have to care what I do or what I’m like. We can have our fun and be awfully fond of each other, and it’s all serene and right. But if I were Mrs. Gerald Fane, all my faults and shortcomings, my not knowing the things that everybody in your society knows, my not having any elegant accomplishments, would show up so glaring that I should know you must be mortified. You couldn’t help it.”
“Stop, dear! You enrage me. You put me beside myself. You are so superficial. And dense. And you hold me up to myself in the features of a beastly cad! I won’t have it. For one thing, let me tell you that if I were the Lord Ronald Macdonald of that song we’ve heard Miss Felixson sing, and you were that canny lass Leezie Lindsay, I should know jolly well that after I’d carried you off to the Hielands my bride and my darling to be, it would be a very short time before Lady Ronald Macdonald had all the airs and tricks of speech of my sisters and cousins. That, however, is neither here nor there. Who wants you to be different? Aurora, if you only knew yourself! Ceres, or Summer, or Peace sitting among the wheat-sheaves, 401what would it matter that she had not been educated at a fashionable boarding-school? Let her just breathe and be,–beautiful, benign, and any man not utterly a fool will prefer to lie at her knees, keeping still while her silence appeases and reconciles him, to hearing the most brilliant conversation of a lady novelist.”
“You can talk beautifully, Gerald, that’s one sure thing; but talk me over you can’t. Seems to me I should have to be crazy to forget all in a moment what I’ve said over and over to myself, and drilled myself not to lose sight of. After you asked me the other day, though I knew it was just on the spur of the moment, I thought it all out in the night as much as if it had been serious, and I saw what would be the one safe course for little me. I mustn’t; that’s all there is to it. Everything is wrong for it to turn out happy in the end. I’m terribly fond of you, but I should be scared to death of you, simply scared to death, as a husband. We’re not the same kind. If I could forget it on my own account, I have only to remember how it would strike Estelle. And Estelle’s got no end of horse sense. It’s according to horse sense we must act when it comes to settling the real things of life. I expect”–she had the effect of turning a page or a corner; she dropped from heights of argument to low plains–“I expect I shall be big as a mountain by and by. I don’t see any help for it. I starve myself, I drink hot water, I take exercise,–nearly walk my legs off,–and the next time I get weighed I’ve gained three pounds! What’s the use? Then, I’m older than you.”
“Not at all. I’m older than the everlasting hills; you are the youngest thing that lives.”
“That’s all right, but you were twenty-eight your last 402birthday, and I’m thirty. I’m afraid my character’s already pretty well fixed in its present form. When it comes over me, for instance, to play the clown, I’ve got to do it or burst. And you’re naturally a tyrant, you know.”