now to depreciate our relation--you won't succeed.
It will remain always your most splendid experience.

MARGARET. Bah ... when I think that I tolerated that rubbish for a
whole year!

GILBERT. Tolerated? You were entranced with it. Don't be ungrateful--
I'm not. Miserably as you behaved at the last, for me it can't poison
my memories. And anyhow, that was part of the whole.

MARGARET. You don't mean it!

GILBERT. Yes ... And now listen to this one statement I owe to you: at
the very time when you were beginning to turn away from me, when you
felt this drawing toward the stable--_la nostalgie de l'ecurie_--I was
realizing that at heart I was done with you.

MARGARET. No ...!

GILBERT. It's quite characteristic, Margaret, that you hadn't the least
perception of it. Yes, I was done with you. I simply didn't need you
any more. What you could give me, you had given me; you had fulfilled
your function. You knew in the depths of your heart, you knew
unconsciously ... that your day was over. Our relation had achieved its
purpose; I do not regret having loved you.

MARGARET. _I_ do!

GILBERT. That's splendid! In that one small observation lies, for the
connoisseur, the whole deep distinction between the true artist and the
dilettante. To you, Margaret, our relation is today nothing more than
the recollection of a few mad nights, a few deep talks of an evening in
the alleys of the English Garden; I have made of it a work of art.

MARGARET. So have I.

GILBERT. How so? What do you mean?

MARGARET. What you've succeeded in doing, if you please, I've succeeded
in doing too. I also have written a novel in which our former relations
play a part, in which our former love--or what we called by that
name--is preserved to eternity.

GILBERT. If I were in your place, I wouldn't say anything about
eternity until the second edition was out.

MARGARET. Well, anyhow, it means something different when _I_ write a
novel from what it does when you write one.

GILBERT. Yes ...?

MARGARET. You see, you're a free man--you haven't got to steal the
hours in which you can be an artist; and you don't risk your whole
future.

GILBERT. Oh ... do you?

MARGARET. I have! Half an hour ago Clement left me because I owned up
to him that I had written a novel.

GILBERT. Left you? For ever?

MARGARET. I don't know. It is possible. He went away in anger. He is
unaccountable--I can't tell beforehand what he will decide about me.

GILB