husband's ...

CLEMENT. Oh, of course--I know ... At bottom I've really got nothing
against the cotton business.

MARGARET. What has it to do with my personal views that my husband had
a cotton factory? I always continued my education in my own fashion.
But let's not talk any further about those days--they're far
enough away, thank God!

CLEMENT. But there are others that are nearer.

MARGARET. To be sure. But what does that mean?

CLEMENT. Oh, I only mean that in your Munich surroundings you can't
have heard much of sporting matters, as far as I am able to judge.

MARGARET. I wish you'd stop reproaching me with the surroundings in
which you learned to know me.

CLEMENT. Reproaching you? There can't be any question of that. But it
has always been and still is incomprehensible to me how you got in with
those people.

MARGARET. You talk exactly as if they had been a gang of criminals!

CLEMENT. Child, I give you my word, there were some of them that looked
exactly like highway-robbers. What I can't understand is how you, with
your well-developed sense of ... Well, I won't say anything more than
your taste for ... cleanliness and nice perfumes ... could bear living
among those people, sitting down at the table with them.

MARGARET (smiling). Didn't you do it too?

CLEMENT. I sat down near them--not with them. And you know it was for
your sake, exclusively for your sake, that I did it. I won't deny that
some of them improved on closer acquaintance; there were some really
interesting people among them. And you mustn't get the idea, darling,
that when I'm among ill-dressed people I have a feeling of conscious
superiority. It's not that--but there's something in their whole
bearing, in their very nature, that makes one nervous.

MARGARET. Oh, I think that's rather a sweeping statement.

CLEMENT. Now don't get offended with me, darling. I've just said there
were some very interesting people among them. But how a _lady_ can feel
at home with them for any length of time, I shall never be able to
understand.

MARGARET. You forget one thing, my dear Clement--that in a certain
sense I belong to their circle, or did belong to it.

CLEMENT. You--I beg your pardon!

MARGARET. They were artists.

CLEMENT. Ah good--we're back on that subject again!

MARGARET. Yes--and that's the thing that always hurts me, that you
can't feel with me there.

CLEMENT. "Can't feel with you" ... I like that! I can feel with you all