Juno [ecstatically] Seraphita!

Mrs. Lunn.  I used to be called Sally at home; but when I married a man named Lunn, of course that became ridiculous.  That’s my one little pet joke.  Call me Mrs. Lunn for short.  And change the subject, or I shall go to sleep.

Juno.  I can’t change the subject.  For me there is no other subject.  Why else have you put me on your list?

Mrs. Lunn.  Because you’re a solicitor.  Gregory’s a solicitor.  I’m accustomed to my husband being a solicitor and telling me things he oughtn’t to tell anybody.

Juno [ruefully] Is that all?  Oh, I can’t believe that the voice of love has ever thoroughly awakened you.

Mrs. Lunn.  No:  it sends me to sleep. [Juno appeals against this by an amorous demonstration].  It’s no use, Mr. Juno:  I’m hopelessly respectable:  the Jenkinses always were.  Don’t you realize that unless most women were like that, the world couldn’t go on as it does?

Juno [darkly] You think it goes on respectably; but I can tell you as a solicitor—­

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.