MRS. LUNN. Stuff! of course all the disreputable people who get into
trouble go to you, just as all the sick people go to the doctors; but
most people never go to a solicitor.
JUNO [rising, with a growing sense of injury] Look here, Mrs. Lunn: do
you think a man's heart is a potato? or a turnip? or a ball of knitting
wool? that you can throw it away like this?
MRS. LUNN. I don't throw away balls of knitting wool. A man's heart
seems to me much like a sponge: it sops up dirty water as well as clean.
JUNO. I have never been treated like this in my life. Here am I, a
married man, with a most attractive wife: a wife I adore, and who
adores me, and has never as much as looked at any other man since we
were married. I come and throw all this at your feet. I! I, a
solicitor! braving the risk of your husband putting me into the divorce
court and making me a beggar and an outcast! I do this for your sake.
And you go on as if I were making no sacrifice: as if I had told you
it's a fine evening, or asked you to have a cup of tea. It's not human.
It's not right. Love has its rights as well as respectability [he sits
down again, aloof and sulky].
MRS. LUNN. Nonsense! Here, here's a flower [she gives him one]. Go and
dream over it until you feel hungry. Nothing brings people to their
senses like hunger.
JUNO [contemplating the flower without rapture] What good's this?
MRS. LUNN [snatching it from him] Oh! you don't love me a bit.
JUNO. Yes I do. Or at least I did. But I'm an Englishman; and I think
you ought to respect the conventions of English life.
MRS. LUNN. But I am respecting them; and you're not.
JUNO. Pardon me. I may be doing wrong; but I'm doing it in a proper and
customary manner. You may be doing right; but you're doing it in an
unusual and questionable manner. I am not prepared to put up with that.
I can stand being badly treated: I'm no baby, and can take care of
myself with anybody. And of course I can stand being well treated. But
the thing I can't stand is being unexpectedly treated, It's outside my
scheme of life. So come now! you've got to behave naturally and
straightforwardly with me. You can leave husband and child, home,
friends, and country, for my sake, and come with me to some southern
isle--or say South America--where we can be all in all to one another.
Or you can tell your husband and let him jolly well punch my head if he
can. But I'm damned if I'm going to stand any eccentricity. It's not
respectable.
GREGORY [coming in from the terrace and advancing with dignity to his
wife's end of the chesterfield]. Will you have the goodness, sir, in
addressing this lady, to keep your temper and refrain from using
profane language?
MRS. LUNN [rising, delighted] Gregory! Darling [she enfolds him in a
copious embrace]!
JUNO [rising] You make love to another man to my face!
MRS. LUNN. Why, he's my husband.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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