“I was trying to look like a woman yearning for dinner, that’s all.”
“You must yearn,” he said firmly. “We can always dine, but we can’t always talk sense——”
“Not even now,” she interrupted with a great weariness. “As far as I can make out you are trying to make an honest woman of me. Well, you can’t do it. No one can do it. And I want my dinner, please.”
“Damn dinner! It’s no good being funny about this, Virginia, because I’m frightfully serious. I will not have us slopping about Europe in this hole-and-corner way. You are too fine and I am too old.”
“So this is ‘slopping about,’ is it?” she asked, ever so quietly.
“Don’t, please, drive me into being disloyal to all this——” he was begging her impatiently, when she swiftly interrupted him with a gesture.
“Oh, got you!” she cried, laughing into his astonished eyes. “Don’t you see, you poor Ivor? No possible or prospective husband could have said that—only a lover could have said it, in just that particularly idiotic way! Oh, Ivor, you are too sweet! And that’s why it’s perfectly absurd, all this talk about our marrying. You simply don’t look or think or talk like any possible husband; it’s perfectly obvious to the meanest intelligence that you are a lover and always will be. You simply aren’t casual enough to be anything else, Ivor. I assure you, dear. You will never make any woman feel, deep down in her, that you could be anything so casual as her husband. Anyway, you can’t be mine—oh, please don’t insist!” she pathetically begged him. “For I will give way, and then we will look so silly as husband and wife—or rather, feel silly. Oh, my dear, it’s ever such an impossible relation for Ivor and Virginia!...”
But he insisted that they must be reasonable and responsible people, not vague drifters on the scum of life.
“It’s just a matter of orderliness,” he explained earnestly, “our getting married. You are quite right, it is an effort to see myself as your husband and you as my wife—but we needn’t make the effort once we’ve committed the fact. When I said that you were too fine and I was too old to slop about Europe in a hole-and-corner way, I meant that this disorderly kind of life is unworthy of you, and that I’m not young enough any more to enjoy doing no work all the time. For, you know, one never can do any real work unless there’s some stability in the way of life—one simply must be a responsible person, even a lover must be a responsible person, if he is ever to get any work done. And the idea that a man and a woman of your position can live together and say, ‘the devil take the world’ is bosh, there’s never any conviction about that ‘devil take the world’ remark. I know you don’t care anything about social position, I know you quite sincerely don’t ever want to do social things again—but, Virginia, there’s something displeasing and slack, like two people being in dressing-gowns all day long, in a state about which people can make remarks—and in which you can get mocking letters from Tarlyon! I’m talking sense, Virginia, so don’t argue with me because I want my dinner as much as you do and it’s my turn to be angry next....”
Her silence was serious, her eyes wide with thought. He waited, close beside her, staring at her with a crooked little smile. Then, suddenly, she nodded, just once.