He looked at her steadily. “You don’t mean that!”
“I certainly do. That was what I came for—as he knows. And to settle a little wager I had with him. I’ve settled it. And now I’m doing my real errand. Will you marry us, Mr. Robert Black?—since you have refused—everything else?”
He walked away from her now, over to the window, and stood looking out for a space. Fanny watched him, her head up, her lips smiling a little, ready to face him when he turned again. He came back at last, and he spoke quietly and decidedly.
“If you will send Cary to me,” he said, “and he asks me to do this, I will do it. Not otherwise.”
“What do you want to do? Talk with him, and try to persuade him that I’m not good enough for him?”
“I want to talk with him. I want to ask him to wait to marry you till he comes back.”
“And why, if you please?”
“Because he’s going to find out, over there, that life is something besides a game. And when he comes back, if he still wants you, it will be because you have found it out, too. Oh, I wish—I wish with all my heart—you would stop playing and be real. Why not?”
“I think,” said Fanny Fitch, “it’s because I’m made that way. You might as well give me up. If I laugh, it’s as likely as not to be because I want to cry. And if I cry, it’s more than likely to be true that I’m laughing inside. I love to act, on the stage or off of it. How can I help that? It’s the true dramatic instinct. How can I be any more real than I am? Being what you call unreal is reality to me. If I were to try to be what to you is real, I should be more unreal than I am now. There, Mr. Minister what will you do with that?”
Black shook his head. “You are merely juggling with words now,” he said. “I think you know what I mean as well as I do. And I think something will happen which will make you unwilling to play with things—and people—as you do now. Meanwhile——”