May Wynn ends her relationship with Willie Keith

May Wynn ends her relationship with Willie Keith by refusing his proposal and insisting that their romance stop, even as their farewell exposes how much they still feel for one another. The breakup turns on a sharp mismatch: Willie treats their remaining time together as a reason to keep trying, while May sees the prospect of more time as prolonging a painful, impractical attachment. Her decision is firm; his repeated appeals only carry them to a more wrenching departure.

The proposal and its refusal

The decisive exchange begins when Willie asks, “Let me put it another way-will you marry me?” The proposal follows a relationship in which May has enjoyed herself, but now regards her own participation as a mistake. She explains that she had once been able to overlook the difference between them; somewhere along the way, she says, she forgot that she was Tootsie Weaver. Her reference to the name makes the romance’s assumed identity part of the break: she no longer wants to keep inhabiting a version of herself shaped by the relationship.

Willie looks down at the glass in his hands while a trumpeter plays deafeningly into the microphone and dancers jostle their table. The crowded, noisy setting does not soften the conversation; it makes the mismatch between the intimacy of the proposal and the public bustle around it more pronounced. May says she does not expect Willie to marry her, and she acknowledges that he had been straightforward about his background when they talked over pizzas. Her explanation is not that he deceived her, but that she has changed her mind about what she can bear. She ends the possibility of a shared future before his departure to sea can turn the separation into a temporary inconvenience.

The circumstances May names

May makes the obstacles concrete when she explains why she cannot treat the affair as a harmless interlude. She is a poor Bronx girl whose parents run a fruit store that does not pay; one brother is in the Army, and another is absent except when he needs money to escape trouble. What she wants, she says, is the chance to earn money and live in peace. Her family’s economic insecurity is not background decoration: it gives practical weight to her refusal to add a hopeless romance to the burdens she already carries.

That practical demand conflicts with Willie’s appeal to affection and youth. He points out that they are both young and that he will be at sea in three months. May answers that she knows, calls him darling, and wishes him well with another girl someday, but says she does not want another three months as Tootsie—or another evening, or even another minute. The repeated narrowing of the time frame closes off each compromise Willie might imagine. His impending absence does not make the relationship easier for her to accept; it makes continued attachment look like a short, painful extension without a future she can trust.

A farewell stretched to the deadline

After May ends the conversation, they leave together and climb into a taxi. Their kisses are described as torment rather than pleasure, and neither can stop them. The physical intensity of the farewell therefore runs against the decision already spoken: the couple can still be drawn together, but that attraction does not undo May’s choice. When the taxi reaches the entrance to Furnald Hall, Willie sees that it is eleven twenty-five and tells the driver to keep going.

The return journey brings the separation to another threshold. May asks whether he would take her home to meet his mother; Willie looks into her eyes, falters, and turns away. Her sudden dryness and reference to having predicted his answer to Marty Rubin show that she has already anticipated this refusal. She does not blame him, but tells him to return to the Navy. At Furnald Hall, Willie still cannot get out and leave her behind. With three minutes to midnight, he makes a last, extended appeal for them to live for the present, gathering arguments about youth, pleasure, and time. The scene measures his attempt against an actual deadline: outside, midshipmen stream into the building, while his demerits begin to accumulate and he waits for May’s answer.

The final separation

May’s last explanation is more personal and cutting than her earlier account of their circumstances. She calls herself a fool for falling in love with Willie, judges him emotionally immature, and mocks the way his hair stands up at the back. She also links her attraction to his education, saying she will avoid men with more than a public-school education in the future. The teasing does not turn her decision into a game: when Willie explains that he is getting demerits because he keeps looking at his watch, she orders him out of her life and tells him she will never see him again.

Willie answers that he loves her as he opens the taxi door. May pushes him out and slams it. He races into Furnald Hall, where the clock reads four minutes past twelve and Ensign Brain waits beneath it. The clock completes the scene’s contrast between the private struggle to postpone parting and the institutional schedule Willie has already violated. His proposal has not secured a future, and his last-minute plea has not recovered the relationship. May’s refusal ends their romance in action as well as in words, leaving Willie to return alone to the obligations that had been closing in throughout their farewell.