Short Plays quotes

It may be asked why I have written “The Admirable Bashville” in blank verse. My answer is that I had but a week to write it in.

Blank verse is so childishly easy and expeditious (hence, by the way, Shakespeare’s copious output), that by adopting it I was enabled to do within the week what would have cost me a month in prose.

Besides, I am fond of blank verse. Not nineteenth century blank verse, of course, nor indeed, with a very few exceptions, any post-Shakespearean blank verse. Nay, not Shakespearean blank verse itself later than the histories.

… prose dialogue of the first scene in As You Like It, or Hamlet’s colloquies with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, there is really no excuse for The Seven Ages and “To be or not to be,” except the excuse of a haste that made great facility indispensable.

I am quite sure that anyone who is to recover the charm of blank verse must frankly go back to its beginnings and start a literary pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

I like the melodious singsong, the clear simple one-line and two-line sayings, and the occasional rhymed tags, like the half closes in an eighteenth century symphony, in Peele, Kyd, Greene, and the histories of Shakespeare.

Now, by Heaven, Some fate is pushing thee upon thy doom. Canst thou not hear thy sands as they run out? They thunder like an avalanche. Old man:

Two things I hate, my duty and my mother.

Why dost thou urge them both upon me now? Presume not on thine age and on thy nastiness. Vanish, and promptly.

Or why I do propose to lose my strength, To blanch my hair, to let the gums recede Far up my yellowing teeth, and finally Lie down and moulder in a rotten grave?

Only one thing more foolish could have been, And that was to be born, not man, but woman.

This was thy folly, why rebuk’st thou mine?

My calling hath apprenticed me to pangs. This is a rib-bender; but I can bear it.

It is a lonely thing to be a champion.

It is a lonelier thing to be a woman.

My calling hath apprenticed me to pangs. This is a rib-bender; but I can bear it. It is a lonely thing to be a champion.

It is a lonelier thing to be a woman.

Be lonely then. Shall it be said of thee That for his brawn thou misalliance mad’st Wi’ the Prince of Ruffians? Never. Go thy ways;

There spake my fate: I knew you would say that.

Oh, mothers, mothers, Would you but let your wretched sons alone Life were worth living!

Had I any choice In this importunate relationship? None. And until that high auspicious day When the millennium on an orphaned world Shall dawn, and man upon his fellow look, Reckless of consanguinity, my mother And I within the selfsame hemisphere Conjointly may not dwell.

It is only fair to add that it has not been proved that any permanent injury to the brain results from it.

In any case the brain, as English society is at present constituted, can hardly be considered a vital organ.

This, to the best of my knowledge, is the technical history of the modern revival of pugilism.

In short, then, what has happened has been the virtual legalization of prizefighting under cover of the boxing glove. And this is exactly what public opinion desires.

We do not like fighting; but we like looking on at fights: therefore we require a law which will punish the prizefighter if he hits us, and secure us the protection of the police whilst we sit in a comfortable hall and watch him hitting another prizefighter.

And that is just the law we have got at present.

Just so, too, does the trainer of performing animals assure us that his dogs and cats and elephants and lions are taught their senseless feats by pure kindness.

The public, as Julius Caesar remarked nearly two thousand years ago, believes, on the whole, just what it wants to believe.

The laboring masses do not believe the false excuses of the vivisector, because they know that the vivisector experiments on hospital patients; and the masses belong to the hospital patient class.

I print it here as a sample of what can be done with even the most hackneyed stage framework by filling it in with an observed touch of actual humanity instead of with doctrinaire romanticism.

Nothing in the theatre is staler than the situation of husband, wife and lover, or the fun of knockabout farce.

I have taken both, and got an original play out of them, as anybody else can if only he will look about him for his material instead of plagiarizing Othello and the thousand plays that have proceeded on Othello’s romantic assumptions and false point of …

Very coldly. Oh, if you wish me to tell a lie—

Surely, as a man of honor⁠—as a gentleman, you wouldn’t tell the truth, would you?

Very well. You have broken my spirit and desecrated my dreams. I will lie and protest and stand on my honor: oh, I will play the gentleman, never fear.

Rousing himself with an effort. You are quite right, Mrs. Bompas: I beg your pardon. You must excuse my temper. I have got growing pains, I think.

The process of growing from romantic boyhood into cynical maturity usually takes fifteen years. When it is compressed into fifteen minutes, the pace is too fast; and growing pains are the result.

Oh, is this a time for cleverness? It’s settled, isn’t it, that you’re going to be nice and good, and that you’ll brazen it out to Teddy that you have some other Aurora?

How old are you, Henry?

This morning I was eighteen.

Now I am—confound it! I’m quoting that beast of a play. He takes the Candida tickets out of his pocket and tears them up viciously.

What shall we call the volume? To Aurora, or something like that, eh?

I should call it How He Lied to Her Husband.

Strange! As I sat there methought I heard angels singing, “Oh, won’t you come home, Bill Bailey?”

Why should angels call me Bill Bailey? My name is Magnesia Fitztollemache.

Emphasizing the title. Lady Magnesia Fitztollemache.

Proudly.

I shall never be mistaken for a waiter again.

Thanks.

I hope, Mr. Fitztollemache, you are not laughing at my clothes. I warn you that I am an Englishman.

You may laugh at my manners, at my brains, at my national institutions; but if you laugh at my clothes, one of us must die.

I laughed but at the irony of Fate. He takes a gazogene from the cupboard.

If an antidote would not be too much of an anticlimax.

Anticlimax be blowed! Do you think I am going to die to please the critics?

Out with your antidote. Quick!

Rising.

After life’s fitful fever they sleep well. Phyllis: sweep them up.

Phyllis replaces the looking glass on the dressing table; takes up the fan; and fans the Policeman, who rolls away like a leaf before the wind to the wall. She disposes similarly of the Landlord and Doctor.

Well, Miss, I’m a gentleman to my tobacconist.

Every man is a gentleman to his tobacconist.

The parliamentary candidate for Hornsey always addresses me as a gentleman. But then he ain’t particular: leastways, not at election times. You see, Miss, there are three classes of gentry in this country.

The other paper gives you nothing but the vituperative ravings of an illiterate penny-a-liner blinded by party passion.

You should never read more than one paper, Miss. It unsettles the mind, let alone the waste of a penny.

Well, it’s a great relief to me to hear that the Great Chancellor paper is the right one. To the Lord Chancellor. You think I may believe everything it says?

Madam: I must request you to speak like a lady and not like a procession of the unemployed.

The House of Lords always gives charity and never gives justice.

The House of Lords will find itself unemployed one of these days, if you ask me.

Ferruccio makes a demonstration. Oh, I know that your Excellency has been taught by fencers and wrestlers and the like; but I can take all you can give me without turning a hair, and settle the account when you are out of breath.

That is why common men are dangerous, your Excellency: they are inured to toil and endurance.

Besides, I know all the tricks.

Shouting after him. Must the rich die that the poor may live?

The poor often die that the rich may live.

What an honor for them! But it would have been no honor for me to die merely that you might marry your clod of a fisherman.

It would have been a good deed to kill you, I think.

Killing is always sport, my Giuliaccia.

On the lake. Giulietta! Giulietta!

Calling after her.

The devil does evil for pure love of it: he does not ask a price: he offers it.

Squarcio returns. Prepare supper for four, bandit.

Dog of a bandit: you should have been born a nobleman.

I was born noble, Signor; but as we had no money to maintain our pretensions, I dropped them.

He goes back into the inn.

Perhaps.

If you love a man you are his slave: everything he says⁠—everything he does⁠—is a stab to your heart: every day is a long dread of losing him.

Better kill him if there be no other escape.

I feel that there is nothing but a bait of ten crowns between me and death, Squarcio.

It is enough, Excellency. And enough is always enough.

Do not think of that, Excellency. It is only that we are poor folk, and have to consider how to make both ends meet as one may say. Looking at the dish. Excellency—?

Do you think I will die here like a rat in a trap—His breath fails him.

Rats have to wait in their traps for death, Signor. Why not you?

You are welcome, Signor. The blood flows freeest when it is hot.

Oh, it is not possible that I, a nobleman, should die by such filthy hands.

You have lived by them, Signor. I see no sign of any work on your own hands. We can bring death as well as life, we poor people, Signor.

Mother of God, what shall I do?

You are devilishly ready with your answers. Tell me, Giulietta: is what your father told me true? Is your blood really noble?

It is red, Signor, like the blood of the Christ in the picture in Church. I do not know if yours is different.

I shall see when my father kills you.

It was the terror of the soul, Signor.

And I do not pity your soul: you have a wicked soul. But you have pretty teeth.

The toothache lasted a week; but the agony of my soul was too dreadful to last five minutes: I should have died of it if it could have kept its grip of me. But you helped me out of it.

And so on, and so forth.

The thing is to be done; and it is not to be done. Everything is to be changed and nothing is to be changed.

The problem is to be faced and the solution to be shirked. And the word of Dickens is to be justified.

In dealing with the question of the censorship, everything depends on the correct use of the word immorality, and a careful discrimination between the powers of a magistrate or judge to administer a code, and those of a censor to please himself.

Whatever is contrary to established manners and customs is immoral.

An immoral act or doctrine is not necessarily a sinful one: on the contrary, every advance in thought and conduct is by definition immoral until it has converted the majority.

Morality has not only every engine that lawgivers can devise in full operation for its protection, but also that enormous weight of public opinion enforced by social ostracism which is stronger than all the statutes.

A censor pretending to protect morality is like a child pushing the cushions of a railway carriage to give itself the sensation of making the train travel at sixty miles an hour.

It is immorality, not morality, that needs protection: it is morality, not immorality, that needs restraint;

If our judges had so little power there would be no law in England. If our churches had so much, there would be no theatre, no literature, no science, no art, possibly no England.

The institution is at once absurdly despotic and abjectly weak.

An Enlightened Censorship Still Worse Than the Lord Chamberlain’s

It is no more possible for me to do my work honestly as a playwright without giving pain than it is for a dentist.

The nation’s morals are like its teeth: the more decayed they are the more it hurts to touch them.

Prevent dentists and dramatists from giving pain, and not only will our morals become as carious as our teeth, but toothache and the plagues that follow neglected morality will presently cause more agony than all the dentists and dramatists at their worst have caused since …

Would it not rather take the popular English view that freedom and virtue generally are sweet and desirable only when they cost nothing?

Nothing worth having is to be had without risk.

A mother risks her child’s life every time she lets it ramble through the countryside, or cross the street, or clamber over the rocks on the shore by itself. A father risks his son’s morals when he gives him a latchkey.

You have only to imagine the Privy Council as consisting of men of the world highly endowed with common sense, to persuade yourself that the supplementing of the law by the common sense of the Privy Council would settle the whole difficulty.

But no man knows what he means by common sense, though every man can tell you that it is very uncommon, even in Privy Councils.

And since every ploughman is a man of the world, it is evident that even the phrase itself does not mean what it says.

I need hardly say that I have not availed myself of this licence, and do not intend to.

There is enough licensed darkness in our theatres today without my adding to it.

Postscript—Since the above was written the Lord Chamberlain has made an attempt to evade his responsibility and perhaps to postpone his doom by appointing an advisory committee, unknown to the law, on which he will presumably throw any odium that may attach to refusals of …

They’re sound enough to hang a horse-thief, anyhow.

Any fool can hang the wisest man in the country. Nothing he likes better.

But you can’t hang me.

Oh, is that the way to speak of the ruler of the universe—the great and almighty God?

He’s a sly one. He’s a mean one. He lies low for you.

He plays cat and mouse with you. He lets you run loose until you think you’re shut of him; and then, when you least expect it, he’s got you.

To Blanco. If it comes to hanging you, you’d better for your own sake be hanged in a proper state of mind than in an improper one. But it won’t make any difference to us: make no mistake about that.

Lord keep me wicked till I die!

Now I’ve said my little prayer. I’m ready. Not that I’m guilty, mind you; but this is a rotten town, dead certain to do the wrong thing.

To Blanco. Don’t you be uneasy. You will get justice here. It may be rough justice; but it is justice.

Hanging horse-thieves is justice; so now you know.

Now then: we’ve wasted enough time. Hustle with your witness there, will you?

It would be an insult to every respectable woman here to believe her.

It’s easy to be respectable with nobody ever offering you a chance to be anything else.

Clamoring all together. Shut up, you hussy. You’re a disgrace. How dare you open your lips to answer your betters? Hold your tongue and learn your place, miss. You painted slut! Whip her out of the town!

Well, she’s a failure as a bad woman; and I’m a failure as a bad man. So let Brother Daniels marry us to keep all the rottenness in the family. What do you say, Feemy?

Thank you; but when I marry I’ll marry a man that could do a decent action without surprising himself out of his senses.

You’re like a child with a new toy: you and your bit of human kindness!

I was a good wife to the child’s father.

I don’t think any woman wants to be a good wife twice in her life.

I want somebody to be a good husband to me now.

Walking about and laying down the law.

There’s no such thing as public opinion.

No such thing as public opinion!!

Grasp that fact, my dear Balsquith; and you have grasped the secret of government.

Public opinion is mind. Mind is inseparable from matter.

Shoot down the matter and you kill the mind.

Grasp that fact, my dear Balsquith; and you have grasped the secret of government. Public opinion is mind. Mind is inseparable from matter.

Shoot down the matter and you kill the mind.

Intolerantly. No I won’t hang it all. It’s no use coming to me and talking about public opinion. You have put yourself into the hands of the army; and you are committed to military methods.

Stop. Stop, I say. I don’t know. That is the difference between your job and mine, Mitchener.

After twenty years in the army a man thinks he knows everything. After twenty months in the Cabinet he knows that he knows nothing.

We learn from history that men never learn anything from history. That’s not my own: it’s Hegel.

These are the romantic ravings of a Jingo civilian, Balsquith. At least you’ll not deny that the absolute command of the sea is essential to our security.

The absolute command of the sea is essential to the security of the principality of Monaco. But Monaco isn’t going to get it.

And consequently Monaco enjoys no security. What a frightful thing! How do the inhabitants sleep with the possibility of invasion, of bombardment, continually present to their minds? Would you have our English slumbers broken in the same way? Are we also to live without security?

Dogmatically. Yes. There’s no such thing as security in the world: and there never can be as long as men are mortal.

England will be secure when England is dead, just as the streets of London will be safe when there’s no longer a man in her streets to be run over or a vehicle to run over him.

When you military chaps ask for security you are crying for the moon.

Dogmatically. Yes.

There’s no such thing as security in the world: and there never can be as long as men are mortal.

England will be secure when England is dead, just as the streets of London will be safe when there’s no longer a man in her streets to be run over or a vehicle to run over him.

I wouldn’t compare risks run to bear livin’ people into the world to risks run to blow dhem out of it.

A mother’s risk is jooty: a soldier’s is nothin but divilmint.

Nettled. Let me tell you, Mrs. Farrell, that if the men did not fight, the women would have to fight themselves. We spare you that at all events.

Deeply wounded.

The service is a disgrace to me.

When my mother’s people pass me in the street with this uniform on, I ’ardly know which way to look. There never was a soldier in my fam’ly before.

This question must be solved by blood and iron, as was well said by Bismarck, whom I have reason to believe was a woman in disguise.

All the really strong men of history have been disguised women.

How can you tell? You never knew that the hero of the charge at Kassassin was a woman: yet she was: it was I, Rosa Carmina Banger. Would Napoleon have been so brutal to women, think you, had he been a man?

Do you find the combination comfortable?

I do not wear combinations, General: with dignity they are unwomanly.

Throwing himself despairingly into the chair next the hearthrug. I shall go mad. I never for a moment dreamt of alluding to anything of the sort.

No. For you now tell me that the Labor Party demands votes for women. That makes it impossible to give them, because it would be yielding to clamor.

The one condition on which we can consent to grant anything in this country is that nobody shall presume to ask for it.

Earnestly. Mitchener: it’s no use. You can’t have the conveniences of Democracy without its occasional inconveniences.

Earnestly. Mitchener: it’s no use.

You can’t have the conveniences of Democracy without its occasional inconveniences.

What are its conveniences, I should like to know?

it was accidental, external, excrescential. Attached to his face from the left ear to the point of his chin was a monstrous goitre, which hung down to his collar bone, and was very inadequately balanced by a smaller one on his right eyelid.

Nature’s malice was so overdone in his case that it somehow failed to produce the effect of repulsion it seemed to have aimed at.

When you first met Thomas Tyler you could think of nothing else but whether surgery could really do nothing for him.

W. H., the “onlie begetter” of the sonnets, with the Earl of Pembroke (William Herbert), and promulgated his own identification of Mistress Mary Fitton with the Dark Lady.

Whether he was right or wrong about the Dark Lady did not matter urgently to me: she might have been Maria Tompkins for all I cared.

But Tyler would have it that she was Mary Fitton;

nor is Cloten’s comment that if Imogen does not appreciate it, “it is a vice in her ears which horse hairs, and cats’ guts, and the voice of unpaved eunuch to boot, can never amend,” the sally of a saddened one.

Is it not clear that to the last there was in Shakespeare an incorrigible divine levity, an inexhaustible joy that derided sorrow?

Think of the poor Dark Lady having to stand up to this unbearable power of extracting a grim fun from everything. Mr. Harris writes as if Shakespeare did all the suffering and the Dark Lady all the cruelty.

Harris’s own play Shakespeare is presented with the most pathetic tenderness. He is tragic, bitter, pitiable, wretched and broken among a robust crowd of Jonsons and Elizabeths; but to me he is not Shakespeare because I miss the Shakespearian irony and the Shakespearian gaiety.

Take these away and Shakespeare is no longer Shakespeare: all the bite, the impetus, the strength, the grim delight in his own power of looking terrible facts in the face with a chuckle, is gone; and you have nothing left but that most depressing of all things: a victim.

Now who can think of Shakespeare as a man with a grievance? Even in that most thoroughgoing and inspired of all Shakespeare’s loves: his love of music (which Mr.

For, after all, what is the secret of the hopeless failure of the academic Bardolaters to give us a credible or even interesting Shakespeare, and the easy triumph of Mr. Harris in giving us both? Simply that

Mr. Harris has assumed that he was dealing with a man, whilst the others have assumed that they were writing about a god

, and have therefore rejected every consideration of fact, tradition, or interpretation, that pointed to any human imperfection in their hero. They thus leave themselves with so little material that they are forced to begin by saying that we know very little about Shakespeare.

Stand. Who goes there? Give the word.

Marry! I cannot. I have clean forgotten it.

Then cannot you pass here. What is your business? Who are you? Are you a true man?

Far from it, Master Warder.

I am not the same man two days together: sometimes Adam, sometimes Benvolio, and anon the Ghost.

Recoiling. A ghost! Angels and ministers of grace defend us!

Well said, Master Warder. With your leave I will set that down in writing; for

I have a very poor and unhappy brain for remembrance.

He takes out his tablets and writes. Methinks this is a good scene, with you on your lonely watch, and I approaching like a ghost in the moonlight. Stare not so amazedly at me; but mark what I say.

What manner of thing is a cadence, sir? I have not heard of it.

A thing to rule the world with, friend.

You speak strangely, sir: no offence. But, an’t like you, you are a very civil gentleman; and a poor man feels drawn to you, you being, as ’twere, willing to share your thought with him.

I have walked in my sleep.

Walk ever in your sleep, fair one; for then your words drop like honey.

With cold majesty. Know you to whom you speak, sir, that you dare express yourself so saucily?

Sitting up as majestically as his ignominious posture allows.

Woman: you have struck William Shakespeare.

Stupent. Marry, come up!!! Struck William Shakespeare quotha! And who in the name of all the sluts and jades and light-o’-loves and fly-by-nights that infest this palace of mine, may William Shakespeare be?

Bluntly.

It is no fault of mine that you are a virgin, madam, albeit ’tis my misfortune.

Terrified again. In mercy, madam, hold no further discourse with him. He hath ever some lewd jest on his tongue. You hear how he useth me! calling me baggage and the like to your Majesty’s face.

Kissing her hand. My body goes through the gate into the darkness, madam; but my thoughts follow you.

No, madam, to your prayers, in which I beg you to remember my theatre.

That is my prayer to posterity. Forget not your own to God; and so goodnight, Master Will.

No, madam, to your prayers, in which I beg you to remember my theatre.

That is my prayer to posterity.

Forget not your own to God; and so goodnight, Master Will.

every insult is a flattery; every testimonial is a disparagement: Joseph is despised and promoted, Potiphar’s wife admired and condemned: in short, you are never on solid ground until you get away from the subject altogether.

There is a continual and irreconcilable conflict between the natural and conventional sides of the case

, between spontaneous human relations between independent men and women on the one hand and the property relation between husband and wife on the other, not to mention the confusion under the common name of love of a generous natural attraction and interest with the …

Fortunately there is one outlet for the truth. We are permitted to discuss in jest what we may not discuss in earnest.

A serious comedy about sex is taboo: a farcical comedy is privileged.

The Favorite Subject of Farcical Comedy

everything visible is as real as in your drawing room at home) is that it is unconvincing; whilst the imaginary scenery with which the audience provides a platform or tribune like the Elizabethan stage or the Greek stage used by Sophocles, is quite convincing.

In fact, the more scenery you have the less illusion you produce.

The wise playwright, when he cannot get absolute reality of presentation, goes to the other extreme, and aims at atmosphere and suggestion of mood rather than at direct simulative illusion.

I’ll be whatever you wish me to be. I tell you I love you.

I love loving you. I don’t want to be tired and sorry, as I should be if I were to be horrid.

I don’t want you to be tired and sorry. Do come and sit down again.

Quite sure. I only want you. She recoils. Don’t be alarmed: I like wanting you.

As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.

Yes; but the impulse to commit suicide is sometimes irresistible.

Quite sure. I only want you. She recoils. Don’t be alarmed: I like wanting you. As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.

Yes; but the impulse to commit suicide is sometimes irresistible.

What!

One never does quite want to stave it off.

Danger is delicious. But death isn’t.

We court the danger; but the real delight is in escaping, after all.

Dragging her hand away and retreating to the end of the chesterfield. No: it’s a question of distance.

Self-control is all very well two or three yards off, or on a ship, with everybody looking on.

Don’t come any nearer.

No: that was what was so tame about it. I wanted to suffer. You get so sick of being happily married.

It’s always the happy marriages that break up.

At last my wife and I agreed that we ought to take a holiday.

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.

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.

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.

Contemplating the flower without rapture. What good’s this?

Not at present; but I’m on the list. I’m her prospective husband: you’re only her actual one.

I’m the anticipation: you’re the disappointment.

Oh, my Gregory is not a disappointment. Fondly. Are you, dear?

Aha! you confess it. Well, if you want to know, nobody told me.

Everybody falls in love with my wife.

And do you fall in love with everybody’s wife?

Raging. Trifles!

I have fallen in love with a monster.

Don’t you dare call my wife a monster.

I mean she oughtn’t to be nice to me. And you oughtn’t to be nice to my wife. And your wife oughtn’t to like me. And my wife oughtn’t to like you. And if they do, they oughtn’t to go on liking us. And

I oughtn’t to like your wife; and you oughtn’t to like mine; and if we do we oughtn’t to go on liking them. But we do, all of us. We oughtn’t; but we do.

But, my dear boy, if we admit we are in the wrong where’s the harm of it? We’re not perfect; but as long as we keep the ideal before us—

His wry faces and agonized belchings are so heartrending that they almost upset Edstaston. When the victim at last staggers to his feet, he is a pale fragile nobleman, aged and quite sober, extremely dignified in manner and address, though shaken by his recent convulsions.

Young man: it is not better to be drunk than sober; but it is happier. Goodness is not happiness.

That is an epigram. But I have overdone this. I am too sober to be good company. Let me redress the balance. He takes a generous draught of brandy, and recovers his geniality. Aha! That’s better. And now listen, darling.

Effusively. Darling: I am a man; and you are a man; and Catherine is a woman.

Woman reduces us all to the common denominator.

Chuckling. Again an epigram! Gravely. You understand it, I hope. Have you had a college education, darling? I have.

Certainly. I am a Bachelor of Arts.

It is enough that you are a bachelor, darling: Catherine will supply the arts.

Aha! Another epigram! I am in the vein today.

I have the scruples of a gentleman.

In Russia a gentleman has no scruples. In Russia we face facts.

In England, sir, a gentleman never faces any facts if they are unpleasant facts.

In England, sir, a gentleman never faces any facts if they are unpleasant facts.

In real life, darling, all facts are unpleasant.

Greatly pleased with himself. Another epigram! Where is my accursed chancellor? these gems should be written down and recorded for posterity. He rushes to the table; sits down; and snatches up a pen. Then, recollecting himself. But I have not asked you to sit down.

Emerging, having arranged his shirt and put on his diamonded coat. You have been badly brought up, little darling. Would any lady or gentleman walk unannounced into a room without first looking through the keyhole? Taking his sword from the table and putting it on.

The great thing in life is to be simple; and the perfectly simple thing is to look through keyholes.

Another epigram: the fifth this morning! Where is my fool of a chancellor? Where is Popof?

Exhausted but calm. Why does valerian soothe me when it excites cats? There’s a question to reflect on! You know, they ought to have made me a philosopher.

Philosophers are born, not made.

Fine old chestnut, that. Everybody’s born, not made.

Embracing him fiercely. Nothing shall tear you from my arms now.

Nothing. I am provided for. Oh how happy this will make my mother!

He plays a wedding march. She plays the bass.

How can he be mad, madam?

What is sanity? The condition of the Inca’s mind. What is madness? The condition of the people who disagree with the Inca.

Then I am a lunatic because I don’t like that ridiculous brooch.

What! You too worship before the statue of Liberty, like the Americans?

Not at all, madam. The Americans do not worship the statue of Liberty. They have erected it in the proper place for a statue of Liberty: on its tomb.

He turns down his moustaches.

Rising angrily. This town is inhabited by dastards. I say it with a full sense of responsibility, dastards! They call themselves Englishmen; and they are afraid to fight.

Afraid to fight! You should see them on a Saturday night.

Yes, they fight one another; but they won’t fight the Germans.

What matters the death rate of Little Pifflington in a moment like this? Think of our gallant soldiers, not of your squalling infants.

If you want soldiers you must have children. You can’t buy ’em in boxes, like toy soldiers.

Beamish, the long and the short of it is, you are no patriot. Go downstairs to your office; and have that gas stove taken away and replaced by an ordinary grate. The Board of Trade has urged on me the necessity for economizing gas.

It would be strange indeed if, after sitting on thirty-seven Royal Commissions, mostly as chairman, I had not mastered the art of public expression.

Even the Radical papers have paid me the high compliment of declaring that I am never more impressive than when I have nothing to say.

I never read the Radical papers. All I can tell you is that what we women admire in you is not the politician, but the man of action, the heroic warrior, the beau sabreur.

I still carry the flattened projectile as a trophy. He throws it on the table; the noise it makes testifies to its weight. Had it penetrated to the brain I might never have sat on another Royal Commission.

Fortunately we have strong heads, we Highcastles. Nothing has ever penetrated to our brains.

How thrilling! How simple! And how tragic! But you will forgive England? Remember: England! Forgive her.

But during the war everyone except the soldiers at the front imagined that nothing but an extreme assertion of our most passionate prejudices, without the smallest regard to their effect on others, could win the war.

Finally the British blockade won the war; but the wonder is that the British blockhead did not lose it.

I suppose the enemy was no wiser. War is not a sharpener of wits; and I am afraid I gave great offence by keeping my head in this matter of Irish recruiting.

but I’m fond of her; and I’m not ashamed of it. Besides, didn’t she win the Cross for me?

By bringing me up to be more afraid of running away than of fighting.

I was timid by nature; and when the other boys hurted me, I’d want to run away and cry. But she whaled me for disgracing the blood of the O’Flahertys until I’d have fought the divil himself sooner than face her after funking a fight.

That’s the way I came to be so courageous.

I tell you, Sir Pearce, if the German army had been brought up by my mother, the Kaiser would be dining in the banqueting hall at Buckingham Palace this day, and King George polishing his jackboots for him in the scullery.

But I don’t like this, O’Flaherty. You can’t go on deceiving your mother, you know. It’s not right.

Your mother must see that as clearly as I do. After all, she is a reasonable, well disposed woman, quite capable of understanding the right and the wrong of the war. Why can’t you explain to her what the war is about?

Arra, sir, how the divil do I know what the war is about?

Rising again and standing over him. What! O’Flaherty: do you know what you are saying? You sit there wearing the Victoria Cross for having killed God knows how many Germans; and you tell me you don’t know why you did it!

Asking your pardon, Sir Pearce, I tell you no such thing. I know quite well why I kilt them.

I kilt them because I was afeard that, if I didn’t, they’d kill me.

Giving it up, and sitting down again. Yes, yes, of course; but have you no knowledge of the causes of the war? of the interests at stake? of the importance—I may almost say—in fact I will say—the sacred right for which we are fighting?

Preserving his dignity. I don’t know about it’s being a great war, sir.

It’s a big war; but that’s not the same thing.

Father Quinlan’s new church is a big church: you might take the little old chapel out of the middle of it and not miss it. But my mother says there was more true religion in the old chapel.

Why should I read the papers to be humbugged and lied to by them that had the cunning to stay at home and send me to fight for them? Don’t talk to me or to any soldier of the war being right.

No war is right; and all the holy water that Father Quinlan ever blessed couldn’t make one right.

There, sir! Now you know what O’Flaherty V.C. thinks; and you’re wiser so than the others that only knows what he done.

Oh! And why the devil did you steal them?

Sure we needed them, sir. Often and often we had to sell our own geese to pay you the rent to satisfy your needs; and why shouldn’t we sell your geese to satisfy ours?

Sweetly. Sure you had to get what you could out of us; and we had to get what we could out of you. God forgive us both!

Sweetly.

Sure you had to get what you could out of us; and we had to get what we could out of you. God forgive us both!

Really, O’Flaherty, the war seems to have upset you a little.

So they all say, sir. I see no great differ myself. It’s all the fright and the excitement; and when that quiets down they’ll go back to their natural divilment and be the same as ever.

It’s like the vermin: it’ll wash off after a while.

Rising and planting himself firmly behind the garden seat. Well, the long and the short of it is, O’Flaherty, I must decline to be a party to any attempt to deceive your mother.

And what did she say?

She asked me how did I know he wasn’t, and fetched me a clout on the side of my head.

But have you never mentioned any famous Englishman to her, and asked her what she had to say about him?

But have you never mentioned any famous Englishman to her, and asked her what she had to say about him?

The only one I could think of was Shakespeare, sir; and she says he was born in Cork.

Exhausted. Well, I give it up. He throws himself into the nearest chair. The woman is—Oh, well! No matter.

Sympathetically. Yes, sir: she’s pigheaded and obstinate: there’s no doubt about it. She’s like the English: they think there’s no one like themselves. It’s the same with the Germans, though they’re educated and ought to know better.

You’ll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.

Whisht, sir, for God’s sake: here she is.

If they’d tell you straight out what they was going to give you, you wouldn’t mind; but if there was twenty ways of telling the truth and only one way of telling a lie, the Government would find it out.

It’s in the nature of governments to tell lies.

Teresa Driscoll, a parlor maid, comes from the house,