“That he should steal your fame!”
“My Moor is five times the chap my Turk was.”
“But you might have had both!”
“And gone without you? Don’t fret over it, my darling.”
“I can’t help”—
She always ends this vein by abusing herself, which I wouldn’t allow another human being to do, and which I don’t like to hear, so I interrupted: “Jastrow says he’ll come over in March to visit us, and threatens to bring the manuscript of his whole seventeen volumes, for me to take a final look at it before he sends it to press.”
“The dear old thing!” she said tenderly. “I love him so for what he was to you that I believe I shall welcome him with a kiss.”
“Why make the rest of his life unhappy?”
“Is that the way it affects you?”
“Woman is born illogical, and even the cleverest of her sex cannot entirely overcome the taint. After you give me a kiss I bear in mind that I am to have another, and that makes me very happy. But if you kiss Jastrow, the poor fellow will go back to Germany and pine away into his grave. Even his fifty-two dialects will not satisfy him after your labial.”