Eve’s exasperation increased. She always had a curious fear that one of these days, if he went on proposing, she might say “Yes” by mistake. She wished that there was some way known to science of stopping him once and for all. And in her desperation she thought of a line of argument which she had not yet employed.
“It’s so absurd, Freddie,” she said. “Really, it is. Apart from the fact that I don’t want to marry you, how can you marry anyone—anyone, I mean, who hasn’t plenty of money?”
“Wouldn’t dream of marrying for money.”
“No, of course not, but . . .”
“Cupid,” said Freddie woodenly, “pines and sickens in a gilded cage.”
Eve had not expected to be surprised by anything her companion might say, it being her experience that he possessed a vocabulary of about forty-three words and a sum-total of ideas that hardly ran into two figures; but this poetic remark took her back.
“What!”
Freddie repeated the observation. When it had been flashed on the screen as a spoken sub-title in the six-reel wonder film, “Love or Mammon” (Beatrice Comely and Brian Fraser), he had approved and made a note of it.
“Oh!” said Eve, and was silent. As Miss Peavey would have put it, it held her for a while. “What I meant,” she went on after a moment, “was that you can’t possibly marry a girl without money unless you’ve some money of your own.”
“I say, dash it!” A strange note of jubilation had come into the wooer’s voice. “I say, is that really all that stands between us? Because . . .”