Bill:
We started talking. She wanted to know about Hollywood. She seemed so interested.
Margo:
She's a girl of so many interests.
Bill:
A pretty rare quality these days.
Margo:
A girl of so many rare qualities.
Bill:
So she seems.
Margo:
So you've pointed out so often. So many qualities so often. Her loyalty, efficiency, devotion, warmth, and affection, and so young. So young and so fair.
Bill:
I can't believe you're making this up. It sounds like something out of an old Clyde Fitch play.
Margo:
Clyde Fitch--though you may not think so--was well before my time.
Bill:
I've always denied the legend that you were in "Our American Cousin" the night Lincoln was shot.
Margo:
I don't think that's funny.
Bill:
Of course it's funny. This is all too laughable to be anything else. You know what I feel about this age obsession of yours. And now this ridiculous attempt to whip yourself up into a jealous froth because I spent ten minutes with a stage-struck kid.
Margo:
Twenty.
Bill:
Thirty minutes, forty minutes, what of it?
Margo:
Stage-struck kid! She's a young lady of qualities. And I'll have you know I'm fed up with both the young lady and her qualities. Studying me as if I were a play or a blueprint, how I walk, talk, think, act, sleep...
Bill:
Now, how can you take offense at a kid trying in every way to be as much like her ideal as possible?
Margo:
Stop calling her a kid! As it happens, there are particular aspects of my life to which I would like to maintain sole and exclusive rights and privileges.
Bill:
For instance what?
Margo:
For instance you.
Bill:
This is my cue to take you in my arms and reassure you. But I'm not going to. I'm too mad...
Margo:
[interrupting] Guilty.
Bill:
...Mad! Darling, there are certain characteristics for which you are famous onstage and off. I love you for some of them in spite of others. I haven't let those become too important. They're part of your equipment for getting along in what is laughingly called our environment. You have to keep your teeth sharp, all right. But I will not have you sharpen them on me - or on Eve.
Margo:
What about her teeth? What about her fangs?
Bill:
She hasn't cut them yet, and you know it! So when you start judging an idealistic, dreamy-eyed kid by the barroom benzedrine standards of this megalomaniac society, I won't have it. Eve Harrington has never by a word, a look, or a suggestion indicated anything to me but her adoration for you and her happiness at our being in love. And to intimate anything else doesn't spell jealousy to me. It spells out paranoiac insecurity that you should be ashamed of.
Margo:
Cut! Print it! What happens in the next reel? Do I get dragged off screaming to the snake pits?
