“And are you going to let that fellow Eldon fondle you like that?”
“Why, honey dear, it’s in the manuscript!”
“Then you can cut it out. I won’t have it, I tell you! What kind of a dog do you think I am that I’m to let other men hug my wife?”
“But it’s only in public, dearest, that he hugs me.”
At the recurrence of this extraordinary logic Winfield simply opened his mouth like a fish on land. He was suffocating with too much air.
Sheila and he kept silence a moment. They were remembering the somewhat similar dispute in another moonlit scene, at Clinton. Only then he was an audacious flirter; now he was a conservative fiancé. Her logic was the same, but he had veered to the opposite side. She murmured, dolefully:
“You don’t understand the stage very well, do you, dear?”
“No, I don’t!” he growled. “And I don’t want to. It’s no place for a woman. You’ve got to give it up.”
“I’ve promised to, honey, as soon as I can.”
“Well, in the mean while, you’ve got to cut out that hugging business with Eldon—or anybody else. I won’t have it, that’s all!”