Juno.  No:  believe me, that’s a foreigner’s mistake:  we are the most romantic people in the world, we English.  Why, my very presence here is a romance.

Mrs. Lunn [faintly ironical] Indeed?

Juno.  Yes.  You’ve guessed, of course, that I’m a married man.

Mrs. Lunn.  Oh, that’s all right.  I’m a married woman.

Juno.  Thank Heaven for that!  To my English mind, passion is not real passion without guilt.  I am a red-blooded man, Mrs. Lunn:  I can’t help it.  The tragedy of my life is that I married, when quite young, a woman whom I couldn’t help being very fond of.  I longed for a guilty passion—­for the real thing—­the wicked thing; and yet I couldn’t care twopence for any other woman when my wife was about.  Year after year went by:  I felt my youth slipping away without ever having had a romance in my life; for marriage is all very well; but it isn’t romance.  There’s nothing wrong in it, you see.

Mrs. Lunn.  Poor man!  How you must have suffered!

Juno.  No:  that was what was so tame about it.  I wanted to suffer.  You get so sick of being happily married.  It’s always the happy marriages that break up.  At last my wife and I agreed that we ought to take a holiday.

Mrs. Lunn.  Hadn’t you holidays every year?

Juno.  Oh, the seaside and so on!  That’s not what we meant.  We meant a holiday from one another.

Mrs. Lunn.  How very odd!

Juno.  She said it was an excellent idea; that domestic felicity was making us perfectly idiotic; that she wanted a holiday, too.  So we agreed to go round the world in opposite directions.  I started for Suez on the day she sailed for New York.

Mrs. Lunn [suddenly becoming attentive] That’s precisely what Gregory and I did.  Now I wonder did he want a holiday from me!  What he said was that he wanted the delight of meeting me after a long absence.

Juno.  Could anything be more romantic than that?  Would anyone else than an Englishman have thought of it?  I daresay my temperament seems tame to your boiling southern blood—­

Mrs. Lunn.  My what!

Juno.  Your southern blood.  Don’t you remember how you told me, that night in the saloon when I sang “Farewell and adieu to you dear Spanish ladies,” that you were by birth a lady of Spain?  Your splendid Andalusian beauty speaks for itself.

Mrs. Lunn.  Stuff!  I was born in Gibraltar.  My father was Captain Jenkins.  In the artillery.

Juno [ardently] It is climate and not race that determines the temperament.  The fiery sun of Spain blazed on your cradle; and it rocked to the roar of British cannon.

Mrs. Lunn.  What eloquence!  It reminds me of my husband when he was in love before we were married.  Are you in love?