Part 3 (1/2)

”Why do you have it in, then?”

”I have to have it in. It has to be in every picture of life, as it has to be in every life. G.o.dolphin is perfectly right. I talked with him about leaving it out to-day, but I had to acknowledge that it wouldn't do. In fact, I was the first to suggest that there must be some sort of love business when I first talked the play over with him. But I wish there hadn't. It makes me sick every time I touch it. The confounded fools don't know what to do with their love.”

”They might get married with it,” Louise suggested.

”I don't believe they have sense enough to think of that,” said her husband. ”The curse of their origin is on them, I suppose. I tried to imagine them when I was only fit to imagine a man hating a woman with all his might.”

Louise laughed out her secure delight. ”If the public could only know why your lovers were such feeble folk it would make the fortune of the play.”

Maxwell laughed, too. ”Yes, fancy Pinney getting hold of a fact like that and working it up with all his native delicacy in the Sunday edition of the _Events_!”

Pinney was a reporter of Maxwell's acquaintance, who stood to Louise for all that was most terrible in journalistic enterprise. ”Don't!” she shrieked.

Maxwell went on. ”He would have both our portraits in, and your father's and mother's, and my mother's; and your house on Commonwealth Avenue, and our meek mansion on Pinckney Street. He would make it a work of art, Pinney would, and he would believe that we were all secretly gratified with it, no matter how we pretended to writhe under it.” He laughed and laughed, and then suddenly he stopped and was very grave.

”I know what you're thinking of now,” said his wife.

”What?”

”Whether you couldn't use _our_ affair in the play?”

”You're a witch! Yes, I was! I was thinking it wouldn't do.”

”Stuff! It _will_ do, and you must use it. Who would ever know it? And I shall not care how blackly you show me up. I deserve it. If I was the cause of your hating love so much that you failed with your lovers on the old lines, I certainly ought to be willing to be the means of your succeeding on lines that had never been tried before.”

”Generous girl!” He bent over--he had not to bend far--and kissed her.

Then he rose excitedly and began to walk the floor, with his hands in his pockets, and his head dropped forward. He broke into speech: ”I could disguise it so that n.o.body would ever dream of it. I'll just take a hint from ourselves. How would it do to have had the girl actually reject him? It never came to that with us; and instead of his being a howling outside swell that was rather condescending to her, suppose I have him some sort of subordinate in her father's business? It doesn't matter much what; it's easy to arrange such a detail. She could be in love with him all the time, without even knowing it herself, or, at least, not knowing it when he offers himself; and she could always be vaguely hoping or expecting that he would come to time again.”

”That's what I did,” said his wife, ”and you hadn't offered yourself either.”

Maxwell stopped, with an air of discomfiture and disappointment. ”You wouldn't like me to use that point, then?”

”What a simpleton! Of course I should! I shouldn't care if all the world knew it.”

”Ah, well, we won't give it to Pinney, anyway; but I really think it could be done without involving our own facts. I should naturally work farther and farther away from them when the thing got to spinning. Just take a little color from them now and then. I might have him hating her all the way through, or, supposing he hated her, and yet doing all sorts of nice little things, and n.o.ble big things for her, till it came out about her father's crime, and then--” He stopped again with a certain air of distaste.

”That would be rather romantic, wouldn't it?” his wife asked.

”That was what I was thinking,” he answered. ”It would be confoundedly romantic.”

”Well, I'll tell you,” said Louise; ”you could have them squabbling all the way through, and doing hateful things to one another.”

”That would give it the cast of comedy.”

”Well?”

”And that wouldn't do either.”

”Not if it led up to the pathos and prettiness of their reconciliation in the end? Shakespeare mixes the comic and the tragic all through!”