The Apple Cart

not care a rap. Orinthia Nothing can derogate from my dignity: it is divine. Hers is only a convention: that is why you tremble when it is challenged. Magnus Not a bit. It is because she is a part of my real workaday self. You belong to fairyland. Orinthia Suppose she dies! Will you die too? Magnus Not immediately. I shall have to carry on as best I can without her, though the prospect terrifies me. Orinthia Might not carrying on without her include marrying me? Magnus My dear Orinthia, I had rather marry the devil. Being a wife is not your job. Orinthia You think so because you have no imagination. And you don’t know me because I have never let you really possess me. I should make you more happy than any man has ever yet been on earth. Magnus I defy you to make me more happy than our strangely innocent relations have already made me. Orinthia Rising restlessly. You talk like a child or a saint. Turning on him. I can give you a new life: one of which you have no conception. I can give you beautiful, wonderful children: have you ever seen a lovelier boy than my Basil? Magnus Your children are beautiful; but they are fairy children; and I have several very real ones already. A divorce would not sweep them out of the way of the fairies. Orinthia In short, when your golden moment comes⁠—when the gates of heaven open before you, you are afraid to come out of your pigsty. Magnus If I am a pig, a pigsty is the proper place for me. Orinthia I cannot understand it. All men are fools and moral cowards when you come to know them. But you are less of a fool and less of a moral coward than any man I have ever known. You have almost the makings of a first rate woman in you. When I leave the earth and soar up to the regions which are my real eternal home, you can follow me: I can speak to you as I can speak to no one else; and you can say things to me that would just make your stupid wife cry. There is more of you in me than of any other man within my reach. There is more of me in you than of any other woman within your reach. We are meant for one another: it is written across the sky that you and I are queen and king. How can you hesitate? What attraction is there for you in your common healthy jolly lumps of children and your common housekeeper wife and the rabble of dowdies and upstarts and intriguers and clowns that think they are governing the country when they are only squabbling with you? Look again at me, man: again and again. Am I not worth a million such? Is not life with me as high above them as the sun is above the gutter? Magnus Yes yes yes yes, of course. You are lovely: you are divine. She cannot restrain a gesture of triumph. And you are enormously amusing. This anticlimax is too much for Orinthia’s exaltation; but she is too clever not to appreciate it. With another gesture, this time of deflation, she sits down at his left hand with an air of suffering patience, and listens in silence to the harangue which follows. Magnus Some day perhaps Nature will graft the roses on the cabbages and make every woman as enchanting as you; and then what a glorious lark life will be! But at present, what I come here for is to enjoy talking to you like this when I need an hour’s respite from royalty: when my stupid wife has been worrying me, or my jolly lumps of children bothering me, or my turbulent Cabinet obstructing me: when, as the doctors say, what I need is a change. You see, my dear, there is no wife on earth so precious, no children so jolly, no Cabinet so tactful that it is impossible ever to get tired of them. Jemima has her limitations, as you have observed. And I have mine. Now if our limitations exactly corresponded I should never want to talk to anyone else; and neither would she. But as that never happens, we are like all other married couples: that is, there are subjects which can never be discussed between us because they are sore subjects. There are people we avoid mentioning to one another because one of us likes them and the other doesn’t. Not only individuals, but whole sorts of people. For instance, your sort. My wife doesn’t like your sort, doesn’t understand it, mistrusts and dreads it. Not without reason; for women like you are dangerous to wives. But I don’t dislike your sort: I understand it, being a little in that line myself. At all events I am not afraid of it; though the least allusion to it brings a cloud over my wife’s face. So when I want to talk freely about it I come and talk to you. And I take it she talks to friends of hers about people of whom she never talks to me. She has men friends from whom she can get some things that she cannot get from me. If she didn’t do so she would be limited by my limitations, which would end in her hating me. So I always do my best to make her men friends feel at home with us. Orinthia A model husband in a model household! And when the model household becomes a bore, I am the diversion. Magnus Well, what more can you ask? Do not let us fall into the common mistake of expecting to become one flesh and one spirit. Every star has its own orbit; and between it and its nearest neighbor there is not only a powerful attraction but an infinite distance. When the attraction becomes stronger than the distance the two do not embrace: they crash together in