“Right-O,” responded Dam. “Go it.”
“Am I the very very loveliest woman that ever lived?”
“No,” replied Dam, “but I wouldn’t have a line of your face changed.”
“Am I the cleverest woman in the world?”
“No. But you’re quite clever enough for me. I wouldn’t have you any cleverer. God forbid.”
“Am I absolutely perfect and without flaw—in character.”
“No. But I love your faults.”
“Do you wish to enshrine me in a golden jewel-studded temple and worship me night and day?”
“No. I want to put you in a house and live with you.”
“Hurrah,” cried the surprising young woman. “That’s love, Dam. It’s not rotten idealizing and sentimentalizing that dies away as soon as facts are seen as such. You’re a man, Dam, and I’m going to be a woman. I loathe that bleating, glorified nonsense that the Reverend Bill and Captain Luniac and poor old Ormonde and people talk when they’re ‘in love’. Love! It’s just sentimental idealizing and the worship of what does not exist and therefore cannot last. You love me, don’t you, Dammy, not an impossible figment of a heated imagination? This will last, dear…. If you’d idealized me into something unearthly and impossible you’d have tired of me in six months or less. You’d have hated me when you saw the reality, and found yourself tied to it for life.”