"Yes, you want it so much that you won't even take it when it's pressed on you. How long do you seriously expect me to bear it?" Nick repeated.
"I never asked you to do anything base," she said as she stood in front of him. "If I'm not clever about throwing myself into things it's all the more reason you should be."
"If you're not clever, my dear Julia—?" Nick, close to her, placed his hands on her shoulders and shook her with a mixture of tenderness and passion. "You're clever enough to make me furious, sometimes!"
She opened and closed her fan looking down at it while she submitted to his mild violence. "All I want is that when a man like Mr. Macgeorge talks to you you shouldn't appear bored to death. You used to be so charming under those inflictions. Now you appear to take no interest in anything. At dinner to-night you scarcely opened your lips; you treated them all as if you only wished they'd go."
"I did wish they'd go. Haven't I told you a hundred times what I think of your salon?"
"How then do you want me to live?" she asked. "Am I not to have a creature in the house?"
"As many creatures as you like. Your freedom's complete and, as far as I'm concerned, always will be. Only when you challenge me and overhaul me—not justly, I think—I must confess the simple truth, that there are many of your friends I don't delight in."
"Oh your idea of pleasant people!" Julia lamented. "I should like once for all to know what it really is."
"I can tell you what it really isn't: it isn't Mr. Macgeorge. He's a being almost grotesquely limited."
"He'll be where you'll never be—unless you change."