dinner? Are they the cure for ruin? My heavens, I’d call myself ruined if I gave them the importance you do. It’s you who are being ruined, not I. When you can take away from me my Beethoven, and the stars and the sunsets and the sea, and my own thoughts and my capacity to love all the things I do love I might agree that I was ruined. And Dane is only making me love all these things the more. For heaven’s sake, don’t come here and talk such drivel to us.”
She paused for breath, and her father, who had forgotten Dane for the present, and was roused to defend himself against her, broke in with fierce irritation.
“You silly fool! Do you think you’re the first person to talk this way and to live to find out you’re wrong? You’re going to lose all your friends ———”
“There you go again, insulting good words. Friends! The people I will lose were never friends and I’ll be glad to lose them. What earthly use to me at any time are people who don’t understand? Don’t you suppose I’ve learned how few friends I have? Will you get it into your head that I don’t care a damn about Government House dinners, about meeting people in their cheapest and most stupid moods? You want to frighten me with the ostracism of a set. Why, I ostracized that set years ago myself, and the hardest thing in my life has been to get the damned thing to let go of me. It persists in coming after me. I came here to get away from it and here you come after me slinging it at me again. What in the name of reason it can do to me that I have not done to it I don’t know. And you have the cheek to say I’ll miss it. If there is one thing on earth I want, it is to miss it, to lose it forever. I wish a tidal wave would come up and sweep it off the face of the earth. Honestly, if you don’t want me to go mad, stop talking about it.”
