“Tell me, tell me, do you not love me?”
I softly unloosened her grasp. An actress on the stage can do justice to these emotional scenes. In real life, a little woman in a peignoir, with hair dishevelled, only makes a hash of them.
“Really,” I said with some annoyance, “I wish you would cease to play the injured wife. You’re saying the very things I’ve been putting into the mouths of my characters for the last five years. They don’t seem real to me.”
“Tell me. Do you love me?”
“Why verge on the sentimental? Have I ever, since we were married, been guilty of one word of love towards you?”
“You have not.”
“Yet we have been happy—at least I have. Then let us go on like sensible, married people and take things for granted.”
“If you do not love me, why did you marry me?”
“Well, you know very well why. I married you because having saved you from a watery grave, I was to a certain extent responsible for you. It was up to me to do something, and it seemed to be the easiest way out of the difficulty.”
“Was that all?”