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Mrs. Warren's Profession

by George Bernard Shaw

December, 1997  [Etext #1097]


The Project Gutenberg Etext of Mrs. Warren's Profession by Shaw
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MRS WARREN'S PROFESSION


by George Bernard Shaw


1894


With The Author's Apology (1902)




THE AUTHOR'S APOLOGY


Mrs Warren's Profession has been performed at last, after a delay
of only eight years; and I have once more shared with Ibsen the
triumphant amusement of startling all but the strongest-headed of
the London theatre critics clean out of the practice of their
profession.  No author who has ever known the exultation of
sending the Press into an hysterical tumult of protest, of moral
panic, of involuntary and frantic confession of sin, of a horror
of conscience in which the power of distinguishing between the
work of art on the stage and the real life of the spectator is
confused and overwhelmed, will ever care for the stereotyped
compliments which every successful farce or melodrama elicits
from the newspapers.  Give me that critic who rushed from my play
to declare furiously that Sir George Crofts ought to be kicked. 
What a triumph for the actor, thus to reduce a jaded London
journalist to the condition of the simple sailor in the Wapping
gallery, who shouts execrations at Iago and warnings to Othello
not to believe him!  But dearer still than such simplicity is
that sense of the sudden earthquake shock to the foundations of
morality which sends a pallid crowd of critics into the street
shrieking that the pillars of society are cracking and the ruin
of the State is at hand.  Even the Ibsen champions of ten years
ago remonstrate with me just as the veterans of those brave days
remonstrated with them.  Mr Grein, the hardy iconoclast who first
launched my plays on the stage alongside Ghosts and The Wild
Duck, exclaimed that I have shattered his ideals.  Actually his
ideals!  What would Dr Relling say?  And Mr William Archer
himself disowns me because I "cannot touch pitch without
wallowing in it".  Truly my play must be more needed than I knew;
and yet I thought I knew how little the others know.

Do not suppose, however, that the consternation of the Press
reflects any consternation among the general public.  Anybody can
upset the theatre critics, in a turn of the wrist, by
substituting for the romantic commonplaces of the stage the moral
commonplaces of the pulpit, platform, or the library.  Play Mrs
Warren's Profession to an audience of clerical members of the
Christian Social Union and of women well experienced in Rescue,
Temperance, and Girls' Club work, and no moral panic will arise;
every man and woman present will know that as long as poverty
makes virtue hideous and the spare pocket-money of rich
bachelordom makes vice dazzling, their daily hand-to-hand fight
against prostitution with prayer and persuasion, shelters and
scanty alms, will be a losing one.  There was a time when they
were able to urge that though "the white-lead factory where Anne
Jane was poisoned" may be a far more terrible place than Mrs
Warren's house, yet hell is still more dreadful.  Nowadays they
no longer believe in hell; and the girls among whom they are
working know that they do not believe in it, and would laugh at
them if they did.  So well have the rescuers learnt that Mrs
Warren's defence of herself and indictment of society is the
thing that most needs saying, that those who know me personally
reproach me, not for writing this play, but for wasting my
energies on "pleasant plays" for the amusement of frivolous
people, when I can build up such excellent stage sermons on their
own work.  Mrs Warren's Profession is the one play of mine which
I could submit to a censorship without doubt of the result; only,
it must not be the censorship of the minor theatre critic, nor of
an innocent court official like the Lord Chamberlain's Examiner,
much less of people who consciously profit by Mrs Warren's
profession, or who personally make use of it, or who hold the
widely whispered view that it is an indispensable safety-valve
for the protection of domestic virtue, or, above all, who are
smitten with a sentimental affection for our fallen sister, and
would "take her up tenderly, lift her with care, fashioned so
slenderly, young, and SO fair."  Nor am I prepared to accept the
verdict of the medical gentlemen who would compulsorily sanitate
and register Mrs Warren, whilst leaving Mrs Warren's patrons,
especially her military patrons, free to destroy her health and
anybody else's without fear of reprisals.  But I should be quite
content to have my play judged by, say, a joint committee of the
Central Vigilance Society and the Salvation Army.  And the
sterner moralists the members of the committee were, the better.

Some of the journalists I have shocked reason so unripely that
they will gather nothing from this but a confused notion that I
am accusing the National Vigilance Association and the Salvation
Army of complicity in my own scandalous immorality.  It will seem
to them that people who would stand this play would stand
anything.  They are quite mistaken.  Such an audience as I have
described would be revolted by many of our fashionable plays. 
They would leave the theatre convinced that the Plymouth Brother
who still regards the playhouse as one of the gates of hell is
perhaps the safest adviser on the subject of which he knows so
little.  If I do not draw the same conclusion, it is not because
I am one of those who claim that art is exempt from moral
obligations, and deny that the writing or performance of a play
is a moral act, to be treated on exactly the same footing as
theft or murder if it produces equally mischievous consequences. 
I am convinced that fine art is the subtlest, the most seductive,
the most effective instrument of moral propaganda in the world,
excepting only the example of personal conduct; and I waive even
this exception in favor of the art of the stage, because it works
by exhibiting examples of personal conduct made intelligible and
moving to crowds of unobservant, unreflecting people to whom real
life means nothing.  I have pointed out again and again that the
influence of the theatre in England is growing so great that
whilst private conduct, religion, law, science, politics, and
morals are becoming more and more theatrical, the theatre itself
remains impervious to common sense, religion, science, politics,
and morals.  That is why I fight the theatre, not with pamphlets
and sermons and treatises, but with plays; and so effective do I
find the dramatic method that I have no doubt I shall at last
persuade even London to take its conscience and its brains with
it when it goes to the theatre, instead of leaving them at home
with its prayer-book as it does at present.  Consequently, I am
the last man in the world to deny that if the net effect of
performing Mrs Warren's Profession were an increase in the number
of persons entering that profession, its performance should be
dealt with accordingly.

Now let us consider how such recruiting can be encouraged by the
theatre.  Nothing is easier.  Let the King's Reader of Plays,
backed by the Press, make an unwritten but perfectly well
understood regulation that members of Mrs Warren's profession
shall be tolerated on the stage only when they are beautiful,
exquisitely dressed, and sumptuously lodged and fed; also that
they shall, at the end of the play, die of consumption to the
sympathetic tears of the whole audience, or step into the next
room to commit suicide, or at least be turned out by their
protectors and passed on to be "redeemed" by old and faithful
lovers who have adored them in spite of their levities. 
Naturally, the poorer girls in the gallery will believe in the
beauty, in the exquisite dresses, and the luxurious living, and
will see that there is no real necessity for the consumption, the
suicide, or the ejectment: mere pious forms, all of them, to save
the Censor's face.  Even if these purely official catastrophes
carried any conviction, the majority of English girls remain so
poor, so dependent, so well aware that the drudgeries of such
honest work as is within their reach are likely enough to lead
them eventually to lung disease, premature death, and domestic
desertion or brutality, that they would still see reason to
prefer the primrose path to the strait path of virtue, since
both, vice at worst and virtue at best, lead to the same end in
poverty and overwork.  It is true that the Board School mistress
will tell you that only girls of a certain kind will reason in
this way.  But alas! that certain kind turns out on inquiry to be
simply the pretty, dainty kind: that is, the only kind that gets
the chance of acting on such reasoning.  Read the first report of
the Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes [Bluebook C
4402, 8d., 1889]; read the Report on Home Industries (sacred
word, Home!) issued by the Women's Industrial Council [Home
Industries of Women in London, 1897, 1s., 12 Buckingham Street,
W. C.]; and ask yourself whether, if the lot in life therein
described were your lot in life, you would not prefer the lot of
Cleopatra, of Theodora, of the Lady of the Camellias, of Mrs
Tanqueray, of Zaza, of Iris.  If you can go deep enough into
things to be able to say no, how many ignorant half-starved girls
will believe you are speaking sincerely?  To them the lot of Iris
is heavenly in comparison with their own.  Yet our King, like his
predecessors, says to the dramatist, "Thus, and thus only, shall
you present Mrs Warren's profession on the stage, or you shall
starve.  Witness Shaw, who told the untempting truth about it,
and whom We, by the Grace of God, accordingly disallow and
suppress, and do what in Us lies to silence."  Fortunately, Shaw
cannot be silenced.  "The harlot's cry from street to street" is
louder than the voices of all the kings.  I am not dependent on
the theatre, and cannot be starved into making my play a standing
advertisement of the attractive side of Mrs Warren's business.

Here I must guard myself against a misunderstanding.  It is not
the fault of their authors that the long string of wanton's
tragedies, from Antony and Cleopatra to Iris, are snares to poor
girls, and are objected to on that account by many earnest men
and women who consider Mrs Warren's Profession an excellent
sermon.  Mr Pinero is in no way bound to suppress the fact that
his Iris is a person to be envied by millions of better women. 
If he made his play false to life by inventing fictitious
disadvantages for her, he would be acting as unscrupulously as
any tract writer.  If society chooses to provide for its Irises
better than for its working women, it must not expect honest
playwrights to manufacture spurious evidence to save its credit. 
The mischief lies in the deliberate suppression of the other side
of the case: the refusal to allow Mrs Warren to expose the
drudgery and repulsiveness of plying for hire among coarse,
tedious drunkards; the determination not to let the Parisian girl
in Brieux's Les Avaries come on the stage and drive into people's
minds what her diseases mean for her and for themselves.  All
that, says the King's Reader in effect, is horrifying, loathsome.

Precisely: what does he expect it to be? would he have us
represent it as beautiful and gratifying?  The answer to this
question, I fear, must be a blunt Yes; for it seems impossible to
root out of an Englishman's mind the notion that vice is
delightful, and that abstention from it is privation.  At all
events, as long as the tempting side of it is kept towards the
public, and softened by plenty of sentiment and sympathy, it is
welcomed by our Censor, whereas the slightest attempt to place it
in the light of the policeman's lantern or the Salvation Army
shelter is checkmated at once as not merely disgusting, but, if
you please, unnecessary.

Everybody will, I hope, admit that this state of things is
intolerable; that the subject of Mrs Warren's profession must be
either tapu altogether, or else exhibited with the warning side
as freely displayed as the tempting side.  But many persons will
vote for a complete tapu, and an impartial sweep from the boards
of Mrs Warren and Gretchen and the rest; in short, for banishing
the sexual instincts from the stage altogether.  Those who think
this impossible can hardly have considered the number and
importance of the subjects which are actually banished from the
stage.  Many plays, among them Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth, Coriolanus,
Julius Caesar, have no sex complications: the thread of their
action can be followed by children who could not understand a
single scene of Mrs Warren's Profession or Iris.  None of our
plays rouse the sympathy of the audience by an exhibition of the
pains of maternity, as Chinese plays constantly do.  Each nation
has its own particular set of tapus in addition to the common
human stock; and though each of these tapus limits the scope of
the dramatist, it does not make drama impossible.  If the
Examiner were to refuse to license plays with female characters
in them, he would only be doing to the stage what our tribal
customs already do to the pulpit and the bar.  I have myself
written a rather entertaining play with only one woman in it, and
she is quite heartwhole; and I could just as easily write a play
without a woman in it at all.  I will even go so far as to
promise the Mr Redford my support if he will introduce this
limitation for part of the year, say during Lent, so as to make a
close season for that dullest of stock dramatic subjects,
adultery, and force our managers and authors to find out what all
great dramatists find out spontaneously: to wit, that people who
sacrifice every other consideration to love are as hopelessly
unheroic on the stage as lunatics or dipsomaniacs.  Hector is the
world's hero; not Paris nor Antony.

But though I do not question the possibility of a drama in which
love should be as effectively ignored as cholera is at present,
there is not the slightest chance of that way out of the
difficulty being taken by the Mr Redford.  If he attempted it
there would be a revolt in which he would be swept away in spite
of my singlehanded efforts to defend him.  A complete tapu is
politically impossible.  A complete toleration is equally
impossible to Mr Redford, because his occupation would be gone if
there were no tapu to enforce.  He is therefore compelled to
maintain the present compromise of a partial tapu, applied, to
the best of his judgement, with a careful respect to persons and
to public opinion.  And a very sensible English solution of the
difficulty, too, most readers will say.  I should not dispute it
if dramatic poets really were what English public opinion
generally assumes them to be during their lifetime: that is, a
licentiously irregular group to be kept in order in a rough and
ready way by a magistrate who will stand no nonsense from them. 
But I cannot admit that the class represented by Eschylus,
Sophocles, Aristophanes, Euripides, Shakespear, Goethe, Ibsen,
and Tolstoy, not to mention our own contemporary playwrights, is
as much in place in Mr Redford's office as a pickpocket is in Bow
Street.  Further, it is not true that the Censorship, though it
certainly suppresses Ibsen and Tolstoy, and would suppress
Shakespear but for the absurd rule that a play once licensed is
always licensed (so that Wycherly is permitted and Shelley
prohibited), also suppresses unscrupulous playwrights.  I
challenge Mr Redford to mention any extremity of sexual
misconduct which any manager in his senses would risk presenting
on the London stage that has not been presented under his license
and that of his predecessor.  The compromise, in fact, works out
in practice in favor of loose plays as against earnest ones.

To carry conviction on this point, I will take the extreme course
of narrating the plots of two plays witnessed within the last ten
years by myself at London West End theatres, one licensed by the
late Queen Victoria's Reader of Plays, the other by the present
Reader to the King.  Both plots conform to the strictest rules of
the period when La Dame aux Camellias was still a forbidden play,
and when The Second Mrs Tanqueray would have been tolerated only
on condition that she carefully explained to the audience that
when she met Captain Ardale she sinned "but in intention."

Play number one.  A prince is compelled by his parents to marry
the daughter of a neighboring king, but loves another maiden. 
The scene represents a hall in the king's palace at night.  The
wedding has taken place that day; and the closed door of the
nuptial chamber is in view of the audience.  Inside, the princess
awaits her bridegroom.  A duenna is in attendance.  The
bridegroom enters.  His sole desire is to escape from a marriage
which is hateful to him.  An idea strikes him.  He will assault
the duenna, and get ignominiously expelled from the palace by his
indignant father-in-law.  To his horror, when he proceeds to
carry out this stratagem, the duenna, far from raising an alarm,
is flattered, delighted, and compliant.  The assaulter becomes
the assaulted.  He flings her angrily to the ground, where she
remains placidly.  He flies.  The father enters; dismisses the
duenna; and listens at the keyhole of his daughter's nuptial
chamber, uttering various pleasantries, and declaring, with a
shiver, that a sound of kissing, which he supposes to proceed
from within, makes him feel young again.

In deprecation of the scandalized astonishment with which such a
story as this will be read, I can only say that it was not
presented on the stage until its propriety had been certified by
the chief officer of the Queen of England's household.

Story number two.  A German officer finds himself in an inn with
a French lady who has wounded his national vanity.  He resolves
to humble her by committing a rape upon her.  He announces his
purpose.  She remonstrates, implores, flies to the doors and
finds them locked, calls for help and finds none at hand, runs
screaming from side to side, and, after a harrowing scene, is
overpowered and faints.  Nothing further being possible on the
stage without actual felony, the officer then relents and leaves
her.  When she recovers, she believes that he has carried out his
threat; and during the rest of the play she is represented as
vainly vowing vengeance upon him, whilst she is really falling in
love with him under the influence of his imaginary crime against
her.  Finally she consents to marry him; and the curtain falls on
their happiness.

This story was certified by the present King's Reader, acting for
the Lord Chamberlain, as void in its general tendency of
"anything immoral or otherwise improper for the stage."  But let
nobody conclude therefore that Mr Redford is a monster, whose
policy it is to deprave the theatre.  As a matter of fact, both
the above stories are strictly in order from the official point
of view.  The incidents of sex which they contain, though carried
in both to the extreme point at which another step would be dealt
with, not by the King's Reader, but by the police, do not involve
adultery, nor any allusion to Mrs Warren's profession, nor to the
fact that the children of any polyandrous group will, when they
grow up, inevitably be confronted, as those of Mrs Warren's group
are in my play, with the insoluble problem of their own possible
consanguinity.  In short, by depending wholly on the coarse
humors and the physical fascination of sex, they comply with all
the formulable requirements of the Censorship, whereas plays in
which these humors and fascinations are discarded, and the social
problems created by sex seriously faced and dealt with,
inevitably ignore the official formula and are suppressed.  If
the old rule against the exhibition of illicit sex relations on
stage were revived, and the subject absolutely barred, the only
result would be that Antony and Cleopatra, Othello (because of
the Bianca episode), Troilus and Cressida, Henry IV, Measure for
Measure, Timon of Athens, La Dame aux Camellias, The Profligate,
The Second Mrs Tanqueray, The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith, The Gay
Lord Quex, Mrs Dane's Defence, and Iris would be swept from the
stage, and placed under the same ban as Tolstoy's Dominion of
Darkness and Mrs Warren's Profession, whilst such plays as the
two described above would have a monopoly of the theatre as far
as sexual interest is concerned.

What is more, the repulsiveness of the worst of the certified
plays would protect the Censorship against effective exposure and
criticism.  Not long ago an American Review of high standing
asked me for an article on the Censorship of the English stage. 
I replied that such an article would involve passages too
disagreeable for publication in a magazine for general family
reading.  The editor persisted nevertheless; but not until he had
declared his readiness to face this, and had pledged himself to
insert the article unaltered (the particularity of the pledge
extending even to a specification of the exact number of words in
the article) did I consent to the proposal.  What was the result?

The editor, confronted with the two stories given above, threw
his pledge to the winds, and, instead of returning the article,
printed it with the illustrative examples omitted, and nothing
left but the argument from political principles against the
Censorship.  In doing this he fired my broadside after
withdrawing the cannon balls; for neither the Censor nor any
other Englishman, except perhaps Mr Leslie Stephen and a few
other veterans of the dwindling old guard of Benthamism, cares a
dump about political principle.  The ordinary Briton thinks that
if every other Briton is not kept under some form of tutelage,
the more childish the better, he will abuse his freedom
viciously.  As far as its principle is concerned, the Censorship
is the most popular institution in England; and the playwright
who criticizes it is slighted as a blackguard agitating for
impunity.  Consequently nothing can really shake the confidence
of the public in the Lord Chamberlain's department except a
remorseless and unbowdlerized narration of the licentious
fictions which slip through its net, and are hallmarked by it
with the approval of the Throne.  But since these narrations
cannot be made public without great difficulty, owing to the
obligation an editor is under not to deal unexpectedly with
matters that are not _virginibus puerisque_, the chances are
heavily in favor of the Censor escaping all remonstrance.  With
the exception of such comments as I was able to make in my own
critical articles in The World and The Saturday Review when the
pieces I have described were first produced, and a few ignorant
protests by churchmen against much better plays which they
confessed they had not seen nor read, nothing has been said in
the press that could seriously disturb the easygoing notion that
the stage would be much worse than it admittedly is but for the
vigilance of the King's Reader.  The truth is, that no manager
would dare produce on his own responsibility the pieces he can
now get royal certificates for at two guineas per piece.

I hasten to add that I believe these evils to be inherent in the
nature of all censorship, and not merely a consequence of the
form the institution takes in London.  No doubt there is a
staggering absurdity in appointing an ordinary clerk to see that
the leaders of European literature do not corrupt the morals of
the nation, and to restrain Sir Henry Irving, as a rogue and a
vagabond, from presuming to impersonate Samson or David on the
stage, though any other sort of artist may daub these scriptural
figures on a signboard or carve them on a tombstone without
hindrance.  If the General Medical Council, the Royal College of
Physicians, the Royal Academy of Arts, the Incorporated Law
Society, and Convocation were abolished, and their functions
handed over to the Mr Redford, the Concert of Europe would
presumably declare England mad, and treat her accordingly.  Yet,
though neither medicine nor painting nor law nor the Church
moulds the character of the nation as potently as the theatre
does, nothing can come on the stage unless its dimensions admit
of its passing through Mr Redford's mind!  Pray do not think that
I question Mr Redford's honesty.  I am quite sure that he
sincerely thinks me a blackguard, and my play a grossly improper
one, because, like Tolstoy's Dominion of Darkness, it produces,
as they are both meant to produce, a very strong and very painful
impression of evil.  I do not doubt for a moment that the rapine
play which I have described, and which he licensed, was quite
incapable in manuscript of producing any particular effect on his
mind at all, and that when he was once satisfied that the ill-
conducted hero was a German and not an English officer, he passed
the play without studying its moral tendencies.  Even if he had
undertaken that study, there is no more reason to suppose that he
is a competent moralist than there is to suppose that I am a
competent mathematician.  But truly it does not matter whether he
is a moralist or not.  Let nobody dream for a moment that what is
wrong with the Censorship is the shortcoming of the gentleman who
happens at any moment to be acting as Censor.  Replace him to-
morrow by an Academy of Letters and an Academy of Dramatic
Poetry, and the new and enlarged filter will still exclude
original and epoch-making work, whilst passing conventional, old-
fashioned, and vulgar work without question.  The conclave which
compiles the index of the Roman Catholic Church is the most
august, ancient, learned, famous, and authoritative censorship in
Europe.  Is it more enlightened, more liberal, more tolerant that
the comparatively infinitesimal office of the Lord Chamberlain? 
On the contrary, it has reduced itself to a degree of absurdity
which makes a Catholic university a contradiction in terms.  All
censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current
conceptions and existing institutions.  All progress is initiated
by challenging current concepts, and executed by supplanting
existing institutions.  Consequently the first condition of
progress is the removal of censorships.  There is the whole case
against censorships in a nutshell.

It will be asked whether theatrical managers are to be allowed to
produce what they like, without regard to the public interest. 
But that is not the alternative.  The managers of our London
music-halls are not subject to any censorship.  They produce
their entertainments on their own responsibility, and have no
two-guinea certificates to plead if their houses are conducted
viciously.  They know that if they lose their character, the
County Council will simply refuse to renew their license at the
end of the year; and nothing in the history of popular art is
more amazing than the improvement in music-halls that this simple
arrangement has produced within a few years.  Place the theatres
on the same footing, and we shall promptly have a similar
revolution: a whole class of frankly blackguardly plays, in which
unscrupulous low comedians attract crowds to gaze at bevies of
girls who have nothing to exhibit but their prettiness, will
vanish like the obscene songs which were supposed to enliven the
squalid dulness, incredible to the younger generation, of the
music-halls fifteen years ago.  On the other hand, plays which
treat sex questions as problems for thought instead of as
aphrodisiacs will be freely performed.  Gentlemen of Mr Redford's
way of thinking will have plenty of opportunity of protesting
against them in Council; but the result will be that the Mr
Redford will find his natural level; Ibsen and Tolstoy theirs; so
no harm will be done.

This question of the Censorship reminds me that I have to
apologize to those who went to the recent performance of Mrs
Warren's Profession expecting to find it what I have just called
an aphrodisiac.  That was not my fault; it was Mr Redford's. 
After the specimens I have given of the tolerance of his
department, it was natural enough for thoughtless people to infer
that a play which overstepped his indulgence must be a very
exciting play indeed.  Accordingly, I find one critic so explicit
as to the nature of his disappointment as to say candidly that
"such airy talk as there is upon the matter is utterly unworthy
of acceptance as being a representation of what people with blood
in them think or do on such occasions."  Thus am I crushed
between the upper millstone of the Mr Redford, who thinks me a
libertine, and the nether popular critic, who thinks me a prude. 
Critics of all grades and ages, middle-aged fathers of families
no less than ardent young enthusiasts, are equally indignant with
me.  They revile me as lacking in passion, in feeling, in
manhood.  Some of them even sum the matter up by denying me any
dramatic power: a melancholy betrayal of what dramatic power has
come to mean on our stage under the Censorship!  Can I be
expected to refrain from laughing at the spectacle of a number of
respectable gentlemen lamenting because a playwright lures them
to the theatre by a promise to excite their senses in a very
special and sensational manner, and then, having successfully
trapped them in exceptional numbers, proceeds to ignore their
senses and ruthlessly improve their minds?  But I protest again
that the lure was not mine.  The play had been in print for four
years; and I have spared no pains to make known that my plays are
built to induce, not voluptuous reverie but intellectual
interest, not romantic rhapsody but humane concern.  Accordingly,
I do not find those critics who are gifted with intellectual
appetite and political conscience complaining of want of dramatic
power.  Rather do they protest, not altogether unjustly, against
a few relapses into staginess and caricature which betray the
young playwright and the old playgoer in this early work of mine.

As to the voluptuaries, I can assure them that the playwright,
whether he be myself or another, will always disappoint them. 
The drama can do little to delight the senses: all the apparent
instances to the contrary are instances of the personal
fascination of the performers.  The drama of pure feeling is no
longer in the hands of the playwright: it has been conquered by
the musician, after whose enchantments all the verbal arts seem
cold and tame.  Romeo and Juliet with the loveliest Juliet is
dry, tedious, and rhetorical in comparison with Wagner's Tristan,
even though Isolde be both fourteen stone and forty, as she often
is in Germany.  Indeed, it needed no Wagner to convince the
public of this.  The voluptuous sentimentality of Gounod's Faust
and Bizet's Carmen has captured the common playgoer; and there
is, flatly, no future now for any drama without music except the
drama of thought.  The attempt to produce a genus of opera
without music (and this absurdity is what our fashionable
theatres have been driving at for a long time without knowing it)
is far less hopeful than my own determination to accept problem
as the normal materiel of the drama.

That this determination will throw me into a long conflict with
our theatre critics, and with the few playgoers who go to the
theatre as often as the critics, I well know; but I am too well
equipped for the strife to be deterred by it, or to bear malice
towards the losing side.  In trying to produce the sensuous
effects of opera, the fashionable drama has become so flaccid in
its sentimentality, and the intellect of its frequenters so
atrophied by disuse, that the reintroduction of problem, with its
remorseless logic and iron framework of fact, inevitably produces
at first an overwhelming impression of coldness and inhuman
rationalism.  But this will soon pass away.  When the
intellectual muscle and moral nerve of the critics has been
developed in the struggle with modern problem plays, the pettish
luxuriousness of the clever ones, and the sulky sense of
disadvantaged weakness in the sentimental ones, will clear away;
and it will be seen that only in the problem play is there any
real drama, because drama is no mere setting up of the camera to
nature: it is the presentation in parable of the conflict between
Man's will and his environment: in a word, of problem.  The
vapidness of such drama as the pseudo-operatic plays contain lies
in the fact that in them animal passion, sentimentally diluted,
is shewn in conflict, not with real circumstances, but with a set
of conventions and assumptions half of which do not exist off the
stage, whilst the other half can either be evaded by a pretence
of compliance or defied with complete impunity by any reasonably
strong-minded person.  Nobody can feel that such conventions are
really compulsory; and consequently nobody can believe in the
stage pathos that accepts them as an inexorable fate, or in the
genuineness of the people who indulge in such pathos.  Sitting at
such plays, we do not believe: we make-believe.  And the habit of
make-believe becomes at last so rooted that criticism of the
theatre insensibly ceases to be criticism at all, and becomes
more and more a chronicle of the fashionable enterprises of the
only realities left on the stage: that is, the performers in
their own persons.  In this phase the playwright who attempts to
revive genuine drama produces the disagreeable impression of the
pedant who attempts to start a serious discussion at a
fashionable at-home.  Later on, when he has driven the tea
services out and made the people who had come to use the theatre
as a drawing-room understand that it is they and not the
dramatist who are the intruders, he has to face the accusation
that his plays ignore human feeling, an illusion produced by that
very resistance of fact and law to human feeling which creates
drama.  It is the _deus ex machina_ who, by suspending that
resistance, makes the fall of the curtain an immediate necessity,
since drama ends exactly where resistance ends.  Yet the
introduction of this resistance produces so strong an impression
of heartlessness nowadays that a distinguished critic has summed
up the impression made on him by Mrs Warren's Profession, by
declaring that "the difference between the spirit of Tolstoy and
the spirit of Mr Shaw is the difference between the spirit of
Christ and the spirit of Euclid."  But the epigram would be as
good if Tolstoy's name were put in place of mine and D'Annunzio's
in place of Tolstoy.  At the same time I accept the enormous
compliment to my reasoning powers with sincere complacency; and I
promise my flatterer that when he is sufficiently accustomed to
and therefore undazzled by problem on the stage to be able to
attend to the familiar factor of humanity in it as well as to the
unfamiliar one of a real environment, he will both see and feel
that Mrs Warren's Profession is no mere theorem, but a play of
instincts and temperaments in conflict with each other and with a
flinty social problem that never yields an inch to mere
sentiment.

I go further than this.  I declare that the real secret of the
cynicism and inhumanity of which shallower critics accuse me is
the unexpectedness with which my characters behave like human
beings, instead of conforming to the romantic logic of the stage.
The axioms and postulates of that dreary mimanthropometry are so
well known that it is almost impossible for its slaves to write
tolerable last acts to their plays, so conventionally do their
conclusions follow from their premises.  Because I have thrown
this logic ruthlessly overboard, I am accused of ignoring, not
stage logic, but, of all things, human feeling.  People with
completely theatrified imaginations tell me that no girl would
treat her mother as Vivie Warren does, meaning that no stage
heroine would in a popular sentimental play.  They say this just
as they might say that no two straight lines would enclose a
space.  They do not see how completely inverted their vision has
become even when I throw its preposterousness in their faces, as
I repeatedly do in this very play.  Praed, the sentimental artist
(fool that I was not to make him a theatre critic instead of an
architect!) burlesques them by expecting all through the piece
that the feelings of others will be logically deducible from
their family relationships and from his "conventionally
unconventional" social code.  The sarcasm is lost on the critics:
they, saturated with the same logic, only think him the sole
sensible person on the stage.  Thus it comes about that the more
completely the dramatist is emancipated from the illusion that
men and women are primarily reasonable beings, and the more
powerfully he insists on the ruthless indifference of their great
dramatic antagonist, the external world, to their whims and
emotions, the surer he is to be denounced as blind to the very
distinction on which his whole work is built.  Far from ignoring
idiosyncrasy, will, passion, impulse, whim, as factors in human
action, I have placed them so nakedly on the stage that the
elderly citizen, accustomed to see them clothed with the veil of
manufactured logic about duty, and to disguise even his own
impulses from himself in this way, finds the picture as unnatural
as Carlyle's suggested painting of parliament sitting without its
clothes.

I now come to those critics who, intellectually baffled by the
problem in Mrs Warren's Profession, have made a virtue of running
away from it.  I will illustrate their method by quotation from
Dickens, taken from the fifth chapter of Our Mutual Friend:

"Hem!" began Wegg.  "This, Mr Boffin and Lady, is the first
chapter of the first wollume of the Decline and Fall off ---"
here he looked hard at the book, and stopped.

"What's the matter, Wegg?"

"Why, it comes into my mind, do you know, sir," said Wegg with an
air of insinuating frankness (having first again looked hard at
the book), that you made a little mistake this morning, which I
had meant to set you right in; only something put it out of my
head.  I think you said Rooshan Empire, sir?"

"It is Rooshan; ain't it, Wegg?"

"No, sir.  Roman.  Roman."

"What's the difference, Wegg?"

"The difference, sir?"  Mr Wegg was faltering and in danger of
breaking down, when a bright thought flashed upon him.  "The
difference, sir?  There you place me in a difficulty, Mr Boffin. 
Suffice it to observe, that the difference is best postponed to
some other occasion when Mrs Boffin does not honor us with her
company.  In Mrs Boffin's presence, sir, we had better drop it."

Mr Wegg thus came out of his disadvantage with quite a chivalrous
air, and not only that, but by dint of repeating with a manly
delicacy, "In Mrs Boffin's presence, sir, we had better drop it!"
turned the disadvantage on Boffin, who felt that he had committed
himself in a very painful manner.

I am willing to let Mr Wegg drop it on these terms, provided I am
allowed to mention here that Mrs Warren's Profession is a play
for women; that it was written for women; that it has been
performed and produced mainly through the determination of women
that it should be performed and produced; that the enthusiasm of
women made its first performance excitingly successful; and that
not one of these women had any inducement to support it except
their belief in the timeliness and the power of the lesson the
play teaches.  Those who were "surprised to see ladies present"
were men; and when they proceeded to explain that the journals
they represented could not possibly demoralize the public by
describing such a play, their editors cruelly devoted the space
saved by their delicacy to an elaborate and respectful account of
the progress of a young lord's attempt to break the bank at Monte
Carlo.  A few days sooner Mrs Warren would have been crowded out
of their papers by an exceptionally abominable police case.  I do
not suggest that the police case should have been suppressed; but
neither do I believe that regard for public morality had anything
to do with their failure to grapple with the performance by the
Stage Society.  And, after all, there was no need to fall back on
Silas Wegg's subterfuge.  Several critics saved the faces of
their papers easily enough by the simple expedient of saying all
they had to say in the tone of a shocked governess lecturing a
naughty child.  To them I might plead, in Mrs Warren's words,
"Well, it's only good manners to be ashamed, dearie;" but it
surprises me, recollecting as I do the effect produced by Miss
Fanny Brough's delivery of that line, that gentlemen who shivered
like violets in a zephyr as it swept through them, should so
completely miss the full width of its application as to go home
and straightway make a public exhibition of mock modesty.

My old Independent Theatre manager, Mr Grein, besides that
reproach to me for shattering his ideals, complains that Mrs
Warren is not wicked enough, and names several romancers who
would have clothed her black soul with all the terrors of
tragedy.  I have no doubt they would; but if you please, my dear
Grein, that is just what I did not want to do.  Nothing would
please our sanctimonious British public more than to throw the
whole guilt of Mrs Warren's profession on Mrs Warren herself. 
Now the whole aim of my play is to throw that guilt on the
British public itself.  You may remember that when you produced
my first play, Widowers' Houses, exactly the same
misunderstanding arose.  When the virtuous young gentleman rose
up in wrath against the slum landlord, the slum landlord very
effectively shewed him that slums are the product, not of
individual Harpagons, but of the indifference of virtuous young
gentlemen to the condition of the city they live in, provided
they live at the west end of it on money earned by someone else's
labor.  The notion that prostitution is created by the wickedness
of Mrs Warren is as silly as the notion--prevalent, nevertheless,
to some extent in Temperance circles--that drunkenness is created
by the wickedness of the publican.  Mrs Warren is not a whit a
worse woman than the reputable daughter who cannot endure her. 
Her indifference to the ultimate social consequences of her means
of making money, and her discovery of that means by the ordinary
method of taking the line of least resistance to getting it, are
too common in English society to call for any special remark. 
Her vitality, her thrift, her energy, her outspokenness, her wise
care of her daughter, and the managing capacity which has enabled
her and her sister to climb from the fried fish shop down by the
Mint to the establishments of which she boasts, are all high
English social virtues.  Her defence of herself is so
overwhelming that it provokes the St James Gazette to declare
that "the tendency of the play is wholly evil" because "it
contains one of the boldest and most specious defences of an
immoral life for poor women that has ever been penned."  Happily
the St James Gazette here speaks in its haste.  Mrs Warren's
defence of herself is not only bold and specious, but valid and
unanswerable.  But it is no defence at all of the vice which she
organizes.  It is no defence of an immoral life to say that the
alternative offered by society collectively to poor women is a
miserable life, starved, overworked, fetid, ailing, ugly.  Though
it is quite natural and RIGHT for Mrs Warren to choose what is,
according to her lights, the least immoral alternative, it is
none the less infamous of society to offer such alternatives. 
For the alternatives offered are not morality and immorality, but
two sorts of immorality.  The man who cannot see that starvation,
overwork, dirt, and disease are as anti-social as prostitution--
that they are the vices and crimes of a nation, and not merely
its misfortunes--is (to put it as politely as possible) a
hopelessly Private Person.

The notion that Mrs Warren must be a fiend is only an example of
the violence and passion which the slightest reference to sex
arouses in undisciplined minds, and which makes it seem natural
for our lawgivers to punish silly and negligible indecencies with
a ferocity unknown in dealing with, for example, ruinous
financial swindling.  Had my play been titled Mr Warren's
Profession, and Mr Warren been a bookmaker, nobody would have
expected me to make him a villain as well.  Yet gambling is a
vice, and bookmaking an institution, for which there is
absolutely nothing to be said.  The moral and economic evil done
by trying to get other people's money without working for it (and
this is the essence of gambling) is not only enormous but
uncompensated.  There are no two sides to the question of
gambling, no circumstances which force us to tolerate it lest its
suppression lead to worse things, no consensus of opinion among
responsible classes, such as magistrates and military commanders,
that it is a necessity, no Athenian records of gambling made
splendid by the talents of its professors, no contention that
instead of violating morals it only violates a legal institution
which is in many respects oppressive and unnatural, no possible
plea that the instinct on which it is founded is a vital one. 
Prostitution can confuse the issue with all these excuses:
gambling has none of them.  Consequently, if Mrs Warren must
needs be a demon, a bookmaker must be a cacodemon.  Well, does
anybody who knows the sporting world really believe that
bookmakers are worse than their neighbors?  On the contrary, they
have to be a good deal better; for in that world nearly everybody
whose social rank does not exclude such an occupation would be a
bookmaker if he could; but the strength of character for handling
large sums of money and for strict settlements and unflinching
payment of losses is so rare that successful bookmakers are rare
too.  It may seem that at least public spirit cannot be one of a
bookmaker's virtues; but I can testify from personal experience
that excellent public work is done with money subscribed by
bookmakers.  It is true that there are abysses in bookmaking: for
example, welshing.  Mr Grein hints that there are abysses in Mrs
Warren's profession also.  So there are in every profession: the
error lies in supposing that every member of them sounds these
depths.  I sit on a public body which prosecutes Mrs Warren
zealously; and I can assure Mr Grein that she is often leniently
dealt with because she has conducted her business "respectably"
and held herself above its vilest branches.  The degrees in
infamy are as numerous and as scrupulously observed as the
degrees in the peerage: the moralist's notion that there are
depths at which the moral atmosphere ceases is as delusive as the
rich man's notion that there are no social jealousies or
snobberies among the very poor.  No: had I drawn Mrs Warren as a
fiend in human form, the very people who now rebuke me for
flattering her would probably be the first to deride me for
deducing her character logically from occupation instead of
observing it accurately in society.

One critic is so enslaved by this sort of logic that he calls my
portraiture of the Reverend Samuel Gardner an attack on religion.

According to this view Subaltern Iago is an attack on the army,
Sir John Falstaff an attack on knighthood, and King Claudius an
attack on royalty.  Here again the clamor for naturalness and
human feeling, raised by so many critics when they are confronted
by the real thing on the stage, is really a clamor for the most
mechanical and superficial sort of logic.  The dramatic reason
for making the clergyman what Mrs Warren calls "an old stick-in-
the-mud," whose son, in spite of much capacity and charm, is a
cynically worthless member of society, is to set up a mordant
contrast between him and the woman of infamous profession, with
her well brought-up, straightforward, hardworking daughter.  The
critics who have missed the contrast have doubtless observed
often enough that many clergymen are in the Church through no
genuine calling, but simply because, in circles which can command
preferment, it is the refuge of "the fool of the family"; and
that clergymen's sons are often conspicuous reactionists against
the restraints imposed on them in childhood by their father's
profession.  These critics must know, too, from history if not
from experience, that women as unscrupulous as Mrs Warren have
distinguished themselves as administrators and rulers, both
commercially and politically.  But both observation and knowledge
are left behind when journalists go to the theatre.  Once in
their stalls, they assume that it is "natural" for clergymen to
be saintly, for soldiers to be heroic, for lawyers to be hard-
hearted, for sailors to be simple and generous, for doctors to
perform miracles with little bottles, and for Mrs Warren to be a
beast and a demon.  All this is not only not natural, but not
dramatic.  A man's profession only enters into the drama of his
life when it comes into conflict with his nature.  The result of
this conflict is tragic in Mrs Warren's case, and comic in the
clergyman's case (at least we are savage enough to laugh at it);
but in both cases it is illogical, and in both cases natural.  I
repeat, the critics who accuse me of sacrificing nature to logic
are so sophisticated by their profession that to them logic is
nature, and nature absurdity.

Many friendly critics are too little skilled in social questions
and moral discussions to be able to conceive that respectable
gentlemen like themselves, who would instantly call the police to
remove Mrs Warren if she ventured to canvass them personally,
could possibly be in any way responsible for her proceedings. 
They remonstrate sincerely, asking me what good such painful
exposures can possibly do.  They might as well ask what good Lord
Shaftesbury did by devoting his life to the exposure of evils (by
no means yet remedied) compared to which the worst things brought
into view or even into surmise by this play are trifles.  The
good of mentioning them is that you make people so extremely
uncomfortable about them that they finally stop blaming "human
nature" for them, and begin to support measures for their reform.

Can anything be more absurd than the copy of The Echo which
contains a notice of the performance of my play?  It is edited by
a gentleman who, having devoted his life to work of the
Shaftesbury type, exposes social evils and clamors for their
reform in every column except one; and that one is occupied by
the declaration of the paper's kindly theatre critic, that the
performance left him "wondering what useful purpose the play was
intended to serve."   The balance has to be redressed by the more
fashionable papers, which usually combine capable art criticism
with West-End solecism on politics and sociology.  It is very
noteworthy, however, on comparing the press explosion produced by
Mrs Warren's Profession in 1902 with that produced by Widowers'
Houses about ten years earlier, that whereas in 1892 the facts
were frantically denied and the persons of the drama flouted as
monsters of wickedness, in 1902 the facts are admitted and the
characters recognized, though it is suggested that this is
exactly why no gentleman should mention them in public.  Only one
writer has ventured to imply this time that the poverty mentioned
by Mrs Warren has since been quietly relieved, and need not have
been dragged back to the footlights.  I compliment him on his
splendid mendacity, in which he is unsupported, save by a little
plea in a theatrical paper which is innocent enough to think that
ten guineas a year with board and lodging is an impossibly low
wage for a barmaid.  It goes on to cite Mr Charles Booth as
having testified that there are many laborers' wives who are
happy and contented on eighteen shillings a week.  But I can go
further than that myself.  I have seen an Oxford agricultural
laborer's wife looking cheerful on eight shillings a week; but
that does not console me for the fact that agriculture in England
is a ruined industry.  If poverty does not matter as long as it
is contented, then crime does not matter as long as it is
unscrupulous.  The truth is that it is only then that it does
matter most desperately.  Many persons are more comfortable when
they are dirty than when they are clean; but that does not
recommend dirt as a national policy.

Here I must for the present break off my arduous work of
educating the Press.  We shall resume our studies later on; but
just now I am tired of playing the preceptor; and the eager
thirst of my pupils for improvement does not console me for the
slowness of their progress.  Besides, I must reserve space to
gratify my own vanity and do justice to the six artists who acted
my play, by placing on record the hitherto unchronicled success
of the first representation.  It is not often that an author,
after a couple of hours of those rare alternations of excitement
and intensely attentive silence which only occur in the theatre
when actors and audience are reacting on one another to the
utmost, is able to step on the stage and apply the strong word
genius to the representation with the certainty of eliciting an
instant and overwhelming assent from the audience.  That was my
good fortune on the afternoon of Sunday, the fifth of January
last.  I was certainly extremely fortunate in my interpreters in
the enterprise, and that not alone in respect of their artistic
talent; for had it not been for their superhuman patience, their
imperturbable good humor and good fellowship, there could have
been no performance.  The terror of the Censor's power gave us
trouble enough to break up any ordinary commercial enterprise. 
Managers promised and even engaged their theatres to us after the
most explicit warnings that the play was unlicensed, and at the
last moment suddenly realized that Mr Redford had their
livelihoods in the hollow of his hand, and backed out.  Over and
over again the date and place were fixed and the tickets printed,
only to be canceled, until at last the desperate and overworked
manager of the Stage Society could only laugh, as criminals
broken on the wheel used to laugh at the second stroke.  We
rehearsed under great difficulties.  Christmas pieces and plays
for the new year were being produced in all directions; and my
six actor colleagues were busy people, with engagements in these
pieces in addition to their current professional work every
night.  On several raw winter days stages for rehearsal were
unattainable even by the most distinguished applicants; and we
shared corridors and saloons with them whilst the stage was given
over to children in training for Boxing night.  At last we had to
rehearse at an hour at which no actor or actress has been out of
bed within the memory of man; and we sardonically congratulated
one another every morning on our rosy matutinal looks and the
improvement wrought by our early rising in our health and
characters.  And all this, please observe, for a society without
treasury or commercial prestige, for a play which was being
denounced in advance as unmentionable, for an author without
influence at the fashionable theatres!  I victoriously challenge
the West End managers to get as much done for interested motives,
if they can.

Three causes made the production the most notable that has fallen
to my lot.  First, the veto of the Censor, which put the
supporters of the play on their mettle.  Second, the chivalry of
the Stage Society, which, in spite of my urgent advice to the
contrary, and my demonstration of the difficulties, dangers, and
expenses the enterprise would cost, put my discouragements to
shame and resolved to give battle at all costs to the attempt of
the Censorship to suppress the play.  Third, the artistic spirit
of the actors, who made the play their own and carried it through
triumphantly in spite of a series of disappointments and
annoyances much more trying to the dramatic temperament than mere
difficulties.

The acting, too, required courage and character as well as skill
and intelligence.  The veto of the Censor introduced quite a
novel element of moral responsibility into the undertaking.  And
the characters were very unusual on the English stage.  The
younger heroine is, like her mother, an Englishwoman to the
backbone, and not, like the heroines of our fashionable drama, a
prima donna of Italian origin.  Consequently she was sure to be
denounced as unnatural and undramatic by the critics.  The most
vicious man in the play is not in the least a stage villain;
indeed, he regards his own moral character with the sincere
complacency of a hero of melodrama.  The amiable devotee of
romance and beauty is shewn at an age which brings out the
futilization which these worships are apt to produce if they are
made the staple of life instead of the sauce.  The attitude of
the clever young people to their elders is faithfully represented
as one of pitiless ridicule and unsympathetic criticism, and
forms a spectacle incredible to those who, when young, were not
cleverer than their nearest elders, and painful to those
sentimental parents who shrink from the cruelty of youth, which
pardons nothing because it knows nothing.  In short, the
characters and their relations are of a kind that the routineer
critic has not yet learned to place; so that their
misunderstanding was a foregone conclusion.  Nevertheless, there
was no hesitation behind the curtain.  When it went up at last, a
stage much too small for the company was revealed to an
auditorium much too small for the audience.  But the players,
though it was impossible for them to forget their own discomfort,
at once made the spectators forget theirs.  It certainly was a
model audience, responsive from the first line to the last; and
it got no less than it deserved in return.

I grieve to add that the second performance, given for the
edification of the London Press and of those members of the Stage
Society who cannot attend the Sunday performances, was a less
inspiriting one than the first.  A solid phalanx of theatre-weary
journalists in an afternoon humor, most of them committed to
irreconcilable disparagement of problem plays, and all of them
bound by etiquette to be as undemonstrative as possible, is not
exactly the sort of audience that rises at the performers and
cures them of the inevitable reaction after an excitingly
successful first night.  The artist nature is a sensitive and
therefore a vindictive one; and masterful players have a way with
recalcitrant audiences of rubbing a play into them instead of
delighting them with it.  I should describe the second
performance of Mrs Warren's Profession, especially as to its
earlier stages, as decidedly a rubbed-in one.  The rubbing was no
doubt salutary; but it must have hurt some of the thinner skins. 
The charm of the lighter passages fled; and the strong scenes,
though they again carried everything before them, yet discharged
that duty in a grim fashion, doing execution on the enemy rather
than moving them to repentance and confession.  Still, to those
who had not seen the first performance, the effect was
sufficiently impressive; and they had the advantage of witnessing
a fresh development in Mrs Warren, who, artistically jealous, as
I took it, of the overwhelming effect of the end of the second
act on the previous day, threw herself into the fourth act in
quite a new way, and achieved the apparently impossible feat of
surpassing herself.  The compliments paid to Miss Fanny Brough by
the critics, eulogistic as they are, are the compliments of men
three-fourths duped as Partridge was duped by Garrick.  By much
of her acting they were so completely taken in that they did not
recognize it as acting at all.  Indeed, none of the six players
quite escaped this consequence of their own thoroughness.  There
was a distinct tendency among the less experienced critics to
complain of their sentiments and behavior.  Naturally, the author
does not share that grievance.

PICCARD'S COTTAGE, JANUARY 1902.



[Mrs Warren's Profession was performed for the first time in the
theatre of the New Lyric Club, London, on the 5th and 6th January
1902, with Madge McIntosh as Vivie, Julius Knight as Praed, Fanny
Brough as Mrs Warren, Charles Goodhart as Crofts, Harley
Granville-Barker as Frank, and Cosmo Stuart as the Reverend
Samuel Gardner.]



ACT I


[Summer afternoon in a cottage garden on the eastern slope of a
hill a little south of Haslemere in Surrey.  Looking up the hill,
the cottage is seen in the left hand corner of the garden, with
its thatched roof and porch, and a large latticed window to the
left of the porch.  A paling completely shuts in the garden,
except for a gate on the right.  The common rises uphill beyond
the paling to the sky line.  Some folded canvas garden chairs are
leaning against the side bench in the porch.  A lady's bicycle is
propped against the wall, under the window.  A little to the
right of the porch a hammock is slung from two posts.  A big
canvas umbrella, stuck in the ground, keeps the sun off the
hammock, in which a young lady is reading and making notes, her
head towards the cottage and her feet towards the gate.  In front
of the hammock, and within reach of her hand, is a common kitchen
chair, with a pile of serious-looking books and a supply of
writing paper on it.]

[A gentleman walking on the common comes into sight from behind
the cottage.  He is hardly past middle age, with something of the
artist about him, unconventionally but carefully dressed, and
clean-shaven except for a moustache, with an eager susceptible
face and very amiable and considerate manners.  He has silky
black hair, with waves of grey and white in it.  His eyebrows are
white, his moustache black.  He seems not certain of his way.  He
looks over the palings; takes stock of the place; and sees the
young lady.]

THE GENTLEMAN [taking off his hat] I beg your pardon.  Can you
direct me to Hindhead View--Mrs Alison's?

THE YOUNG LADY [glancing up from her book] This is Mrs Alison's.
[She resumes her work].

THE GENTLEMAN. Indeed!  Perhaps--may I ask are you Miss Vivie
Warren?

THE YOUNG LADY [sharply, as she turns on her elbow to get a good
look at him] Yes.

THE GENTLEMAN [daunted and conciliatory] I'm afraid I appear
intrusive.  My name is Praed. [Vivie at once throws her books
upon the chair, and gets out of the hammock].  Oh, pray don't let
me disturb you.

VIVIE [striding to the gate and opening it for him] Come in, Mr
Praed. [He comes in].  Glad to see you. [She proffers her hand
and takes his with a resolute and hearty grip.  She is an
attractive specimen of the sensible, able, highly-educated young
middle-class Englishwoman.  Age 22.  Prompt, strong, confident,
self-possessed.  Plain business-like dress, but not dowdy.  She
wears a chatelaine at her belt, with a fountain pen and a paper
knife among its pendants].

PRAED.  Very kind of you indeed, Miss Warren. [She shuts the gate
with a vigorous slam.  He passes in to the middle of the garden,
exercising his fingers, which are slightly numbed by her
greeting].  Has your mother arrived?

VIVIE [quickly, evidently scenting aggression] Is she coming?

PRAED [surprised] Didn't you expect us?

VIVIE.  No.

PRAED.  Now, goodness me, I hope Ive not mistaken the day.  That
would be just like me, you know.  Your mother arranged that she
was to come down from London and that I was to come over from
Horsham to be introduced to you.

VIVIE [not at all pleased] Did she?  Hm!  My mother has rather a
trick of taking me by surprise--to see how I behave myself while
she's away, I suppose.  I fancy I shall take my mother very much
by surprise one of these days, if she makes arrangements that
concern me without consulting me beforehand.  She hasnt come.

PRAED [embarrassed] I'm really very sorry.

VIVIE [throwing off her displeasure] It's not your fault, Mr
Praed, is it?  And I'm very glad youve come.  You are the only
one of my mother's friends I have ever asked her to bring to see
me.

PRAED [relieved and delighted] Oh, now this is really very good
of you, Miss Warren!

VIVIE.  Will you come indoors; or would you rather sit out here
and talk?

PRAED.  It will be nicer out here, dont you think?

VIVIE.  Then I'll go and get you a chair. [She goes to the porch
for a garden chair].

PRAED [following her] Oh, pray, pray!  Allow me. [He lays hands
on the chair].

VIVIE [letting him take it] Take care of your fingers; theyre
rather dodgy things, those chairs. [She goes across to the chair
with the books on it; pitches them into the hammock; and brings
the chair forward with one swing].

PRAED [who has just unfolded his chair] Oh, now d o let me take
that hard chair.  I like hard chairs.

VIVIE.  So do I.  Sit down, Mr Praed. [This invitation she gives
with a genial peremptoriness, his anxiety to please her clearly
striking her as a sign of weakness of character on his part.  But
he does not immediately obey].

PRAED.  By the way, though, hadnt we better go to the station to
meet your mother?

VIVIE [coolly] Why?  She knows the way.

PRAED [disconcerted] Er--I suppose she does [he sits down].

VIVIE.  Do you know, you are just like what I expected.  I hope
you are disposed to be friends with me.

PRAED [again beaming] Thank you, my d e a r Miss Warren; thank
you.  Dear me!  I'm so glad your mother hasnt spoilt you!

VIVIE.  How?

PRAED.  Well, in making you too conventional.  You know, my dear
Miss Warren, I am a born anarchist.  I hate authority.  It spoils
the relations between parent and child; even between mother and
daughter.  Now I was always afraid that your mother would strain
her authority to make you very conventional.  It's such a relief
to find that she hasnt.

VIVIE.  Oh! have I been behaving unconventionally?

PRAED.  Oh no: oh dear no.  At least, not conventionally
unconventionally, you understand. [She nods and sits down.  He
goes on, with a cordial outburst] But it was so charming of you
to say that you were disposed to be friends with me!  You modern
young ladies are splendid: perfectly splendid!

VIVIE [dubiously] Eh? [watching him with dawning disappointment
as to the quality of his brains and character].

PRAED.  When I was your age, young men and women were afraid of
each other: there was no good fellowship.  Nothing real.  Only
gallantry copied out of novels, and as vulgar and affected as it
could be.  Maidenly reserve! gentlemanly chivalry! always saying
no when you meant yes! simple purgatory for shy and sincere
souls.

VIVIE.  Yes, I imagine there must have been a frightful waste of
time.  Especially women's time.

PRAED.  Oh, waste of life, waste of everything.  But things are
improving.  Do you know, I have been in a positive state of
excitement about meeting you ever since your magnificent
achievements at Cambridge: a thing unheard of in my day.  It was
perfectly splendid, your tieing with the third wrangler.  Just
the right place, you know.  The first wrangler is always a
dreamy, morbid fellow, in whom the thing is pushed to the length
of a disease.

VIVIE.  It doesnt pay.  I wouldnt do it again for the same money.

PRAED [aghast] The same money!

VIVIE.  Yes.  Fifty pounds.  Perhaps you dont know how it was. 
Mrs Latham, my tutor at Newnham, told my mother that I could
distinguish myself in the mathematical tripos if I went in for it
in earnest.  The papers were full just then of Phillipa Summers
beating the senior wrangler.  You remember about it, of course.

PRAED [shakes his head energetically] !!!

VIVIE.  Well, anyhow, she did; and nothing would please my mother
but that I should do the same thing.  I said flatly that it was
not worth my while to face the grind since I was not going in for
teaching; but I offered to try for fourth wrangler or thereabouts
for fifty pounds.  She closed with me at that, after a little
grumbling; and I was better than my bargain.  But I wouldnt do it
again for that.  Two hundred pounds would have been nearer the
mark.

PRAED [much damped] Lord bless me!  Thats a very practical way of
looking at it.

VIVIE.  Did you expect to find me an unpractical person?

PRAED.  But surely it's practical to consider not only the work
these honors cost, but also the culture they bring.

VIVIE.  Culture!  My dear Mr Praed: do you know what the
mathematical tripos means?  It means grind, grind, grind for six
to eight hours a day at mathematics, and nothing but mathematics.

I'm supposed to know something about science; but I know nothing
except the mathematics it involves.  I can make calculations for
engineers, electricians, insurance companies, and so on; but I
know next to nothing about engineering or electricity or
insurance.  I dont even know arithmetic well.  Outside
mathematics, lawn-tennis, eating, sleeping, cycling, and walking,
I'm a more ignorant barbarian than any woman could possibly be
who hadnt gone in for the tripos.

PRAED [revolted] What a monstrous, wicked, rascally system!  I
knew it!  I felt at once that it meant destroying all that makes
womanhood beautiful!

VIVIE.  I dont object to it on that score in the least.  I shall
turn it to very good account, I assure you.

PRAED.  Pooh!  In what way?

VIVIE.  I shall set up chambers in the City, and work at
actuarial calculations and conveyancing.  Under cover of that I
shall do some law, with one eye on the Stock Exchange all the
time.  Ive come down here by myself to read law: not for a
holiday, as my mother imagines.  I hate holidays.

PRAED.  You make my blood run cold.  Are you to have no romance,
no beauty in your life?

VIVIE.  I dont care for either, I assure you.

PRAED.  You cant mean that.

VIVIE.  Oh yes I do.  I like working and getting paid for it. 
When I'm tired of working, I like a comfortable chair, a cigar, a
little whisky, and a novel with a good detective story in it.

PRAED [rising in a frenzy of repudiation] I dont believe it.  I
am an artist; and I cant believe it: I refuse to believe it. 
It's only that you havnt discovered yet what a wonderful world
art can open up to you.

VIVIE.  Yes I have.  Last May I spent six weeks in London with
Honoria Fraser.  Mamma thought we were doing a round of
sightseeing together; but I was really at Honoria's chambers in
Chancery Lane every day, working away at actuarial calculations
for her, and helping her as well as a greenhorn could.  In the
evenings we smoked and talked, and never dreamt of going out
except for exercise.  And I never enjoyed myself more in my life.

I cleared all my expenses and got initiated into the business
without a fee in the bargain.

PRAED.  But bless my heart and soul, Miss Warren, do you call
that discovering art?

VIVIE.  Wait a bit.  That wasnt the beginning.  I went up to town
on an invitation from some artistic people in Fitzjohn's Avenue:
one of the girls was a Newnham chum.  They took me to the
National Gallery--

PRAED [approving] Ah!! [He sits down, much relieved].

VIVIE [continuing] --to the Opera--

PRAED [still more pleased] Good!

VIVIE. --and to a concert where the band played all the evening:
Beethoven and Wagner and so on.  I wouldnt go through that
experience again for anything you could offer me.  I held out for
civility's sake until the third day; and then I said, plump out,
that I couldnt stand any more of it, and went off to Chancery
Lane.  N o w you know the sort of perfectly splendid modern young
lady I am.  How do you think I shall get on with my mother?

PRAED [startled] Well, I hope--er--

VIVIE.  It's not so much what you hope as what you believe, that
I want to know.

PRAED.  Well, frankly, I am afraid your mother will be a little
disappointed.  Not from any shortcoming on your part, you know: I
dont mean that.  But you are so different from her ideal.

VIVIE.  Her what?!

PRAED.  Her ideal.

VIVIE.  Do you mean her ideal of ME?

PRAED.  Yes.

VIVIE.  What on earth is it like?

PRAED.  Well, you must have observed, Miss Warren, that people
who are dissatisfied with their own bringing-up generally think
that the world would be all right if everybody were to be brought
up quite differently.  Now your mother's life has been--er--I
suppose you know--

VIVIE.  Dont suppose anything, Mr Praed.  I hardly know my
mother.  Since I was a child I have lived in England, at school
or at college, or with people paid to take charge of me.  I have
been boarded out all my life.  My mother has lived in Brussels or
Vienna and never let me go to her.  I only see her when she
visits England for a few days.  I dont complain: it's been very
pleasant; for people have been very good to me; and there has
always been plenty of money to make things smooth.  But dont
imagine I know anything about my mother.  I know far less than
you do.

PRAED [very ill at ease] In that case-- [He stops, quite at a
loss.  Then, with a forced attempt at gaiety] But what nonsense
we are talking!  Of course you and your mother will get on
capitally. [He rises, and looks abroad at the view].  What a
charming little place you have here!

VIVIE [unmoved] Rather a violent change of subject, Mr Praed. 
Why wont my mother's life bear being talked about?

PRAED.  Oh, you mustnt say that.  Isnt it natural that I should
have a certain delicacy in talking to my old friend's daughter
about her behind her back?  You and she will have plenty of
opportunity of talking about it when she comes.

VIVIE.  No: s h e wont talk about it either.  [Rising] However, I
daresay you have good reasons for telling me nothing.  Only, mind
this, Mr Praed, I expect there will be a battle royal when my
mother hears of my Chancery Lane project.

PRAED [ruefully] I'm afraid there will.

VIVIE.  Well, I shall win because I want nothing but my fare to
London to start there to-morrow earning my own living by
devilling for Honoria.  Besides, I have no mysteries to keep up;
and it seems she has.  I shall use that advantage over her if
necessary.

PRAED [greatly shocked] Oh no!  No, pray.  Youd not do such a
thing.

VIVIE.  Then tell me why not.

PRAED.  I really cannot.  I appeal to your good feeling.  [She
smiles at his sentimentality].  Besides, you may be too bold. 
Your mother is not to be trifled with when she's angry.

VIVIE.  You cant frighten me, Mr Praed.  In that month at
Chancery Lane I had opportunities of taking the measure of one or
two women v e r y like my mother.  You may back me to win.  But
if I hit harder in my ignorance than I need, remember it is you
who refuse to enlighten me.  Now, let us drop the subject.  [She
takes her chair and replaces it near the hammock with the same
vigorous swing as before].

PRAED [taking a desperate resolution] One word, Miss Warren.  I
had better tell you.  It's very difficult; but--

[Mrs Warren and Sir George Crofts arrive at the gate.  Mrs Warren
is between 40 and 50, formerly pretty, showily dressed in a
brilliant hat and a gay blouse fitting tightly over her bust and
flanked by fashionable sleeves.  Rather spoilt and domineering,
and decidedly vulgar, but, on the whole, a genial and fairly
presentable old blackguard of a woman.]

[Crofts is a tall powerfully-built man of about 50, fashionably
dressed in the style of a young man.  Nasal voice, reedier than
might be expected from his strong frame.  Clean-shaven bulldog
jaws, large flat ears, and thick neck: gentlemanly combination of
the most brutal types of city man, sporting man, and man about
town.]

VIVIE.  Here they are.  [Coming to them as they enter the garden]
How do, mater?  Mr Praed's been here this half hour, waiting for
you.

MRS WARREN.  Well, if youve been waiting, Praddy, it's your own
fault: I thought youd have had the gumption to know I was coming
by the 3.10 train.  Vivie: put your hat on, dear: youll get
sunburnt.  Oh, I forgot to introduce you.  Sir George Crofts: my
little Vivie.

[Crofts advances to Vivie with his most courtly manner.  She
nods, but makes no motion to shake hands.]

CROFTS.  May I shake hands with a young lady whom I have known by
reputation very long as the daughter of one of my oldest friends?

VIVIE [who has been looking him up and down sharply] If you like.

[She takes his tenderly proferred hand and gives it a squeeze
that makes him open his eyes; then turns away, and says to her
mother] Will you come in, or shall I get a couple more chairs? 
[She goes into the porch for the chairs].

MRS WARREN.  Well, George, what do you think of her?

CROFTS [ruefully] She has a powerful fist.  Did you shake hands
with her, Praed?

PRAED.  Yes: it will pass off presently.

CROFTS.  I hope so.  [Vivie reappears with two more chairs.  He
hurries to her assistance].  Allow me.

MRS WARREN [patronizingly] Let Sir George help you with the
chairs, dear.

VIVIE [pitching them into his arms] Here you are.  [She dusts her
hands and turns to Mrs Warren].  Youd like some tea, wouldnt you?

MRS WARREN [sitting in Praed's chair and fanning herself] I'm
dying for a drop to drink.

VIVIE.  I'll see about it.  [She goes into the cottage].

[Sir George has by this time managed to unfold a chair and plant
it by Mrs Warren, on her left.  He throws the other on the grass
and sits down, looking dejected and rather foolish, with the
handle of his stick in his mouth.  Praed, still very uneasy,
fidgets around the garden on their right.]

MRS WARREN [to Praed, looking at Crofts] Just look at him,
Praddy: he looks cheerful, dont he?  He's been worrying my life
out these three years to have that little girl of mine shewn to
him; and now that Ive done it, he's quite out of countenance. 
[Briskly] Come! sit up, George; and take your stick out of your
mouth.  [Crofts sulkily obeys].

PRAED.  I think, you know--if you dont mind my saying so--that we
had better get out of the habit of thinking of her as a little
girl.  You see she has really distinguished herself; and I'm not
sure, from what I have seen of her, that she is not older than
any of us.

MRS WARREN [greatly amused] Only listen to him, George!  Older
than any of us!  Well she h a s been stuffing you nicely with her
importance.

PRAED.  But young people are particularly sensitive about being
treated in that way.

MRS WARREN.  Yes; and young people have to get all that nonsense
taken out of them, and good deal more besides.  Dont you
interfere, Praddy: I know how to treat my own child as well as
you do.  [Praed, with a grave shake of his head, walks up the
garden with his hands behind his back.  Mrs Warren pretends to
laugh, but looks after him with perceptible concern.  Then, she
whispers to Crofts] Whats the matter with him?  What does he take
it like that for?

CROFTS [morosely] Youre afraid of Praed.

MRS WARREN.  What!  Me!  Afraid of dear old Praddy!  Why, a fly
wouldnt be afraid of him.

CROFTS.  Y o u r e afraid of him.

MRS WARREN [angry] I'll trouble you to mind your own business,
and not try any of your sulks on me.  I'm not afraid of y o u,
anyhow.  If you cant make yourself agreeable, youd better go
home.  [She gets up, and, turning her back on him, finds herself
face to face with Praed].  Come, Praddy, I know it was only your
tender-heartedness.  Youre afraid I'll bully her.

PRAED.  My dear Kitty: you think I'm offended.  Dont imagine
that: pray dont.  But you know I often notice things that escape
you; and though you never take my advice, you sometimes admit
afterwards that you ought to have taken it.

MRS WARREN.  Well, what do you notice now?

PRAED.  Only that Vivie is a grown woman.  Pray, Kitty, treat her
with every respect.

MRS WARREN [with genuine amazement] Respect!  Treat my own
daughter with respect!  What next, pray!

VIVIE [appearing at the cottage door and calling to Mrs Warren]
Mother: will you come to my room before tea?

MRS WARREN.  Yes, dearie.  [She laughs indulgently at Praed's
gravity, and pats him on the cheek as she passes him on her way
to the porch].  Dont be cross, Praddy.  [She follows Vivie into
the cottage].

CROFTS [furtively] I say, Praed.

PRAED.  Yes.

CROFTS.  I want to ask you a rather particular question.

PRAED.  Certainly.  [He takes Mrs Warren's chair and sits close
to Crofts].

CROFTS.  Thats right: they might hear us from the window.  Look
here: did Kitty every tell you who that girl's father is?

PRAED.  Never.

CROFTS.  Have you any suspicion of who it might be?

PRAED.  None.

CROFTS [not believing him] I know, of course, that you perhaps
might feel bound not to tell if she had said anything to you. 
But it's very awkward to be uncertain about it now that we shall
be meeting the girl every day.  We dont exactly know how we ought
to feel towards her.

PRAED.  What difference can that make?  We take her on her own
merits.  What does it matter who her father was?

CROFTS [suspiciously] Then you know who he was?

PRAED [with a touch of temper] I said no just now.  Did you not
hear me?

CROFTS.  Look here, Praed.  I ask you as a particular favor.  If
you d o know [movement of protest from Praed] --I only say, if
you know, you might at least set my mind at rest about her.  The
fact is, I fell attracted.

PRAED [sternly] What do you mean?

CROFTS.  Oh, dont be alarmed: it's quite an innocent feeling. 
Thats what puzzles me about it.  Why, for all I know, _I_ might
be her father.

PRAED.  You!  Impossible!

CROFTS [catching him up cunningly] You know for certain that I'm
not?

PRAED.  I know nothing about it, I tell you, any more than you. 
But really, Crofts--oh no, it's out of the question.  Theres not
the least resemblance.

CROFTS.  As to that, theres no resemblance between her and her
mother that I can see.  I suppose she's not y o u r daughter, is
she?

PRAED [rising indignantly] Really, Crofts--!

CROFTS.  No offence, Praed.  Quite allowable as between two men
of the world.

PRAED [recovering himself with an effort and speaking gently and
gravely] Now listen to me, my dear Crofts.  [He sits down again].

I have nothing to do with that side of Mrs Warren's life, and
never had.  She has never spoken to me about it; and of course I
have never spoken to her about it.  Your delicacy will tell you
that a handsome woman needs some friends who are not--well, not
on that footing with her.  The effect of her own beauty would
become a torment to her if she could not escape from it
occasionally.  You are probably on much more confidential terms
with Kitty than I am.  Surely you can ask her the question
yourself.

CROFTS.  I h a v e asked her, often enough.  But she's so
determined to keep the child all to herself that she would deny
that it ever had a father if she could.  [Rising] I'm thoroughly
uncomfortable about it, Praed.

PRAED [rising also] Well, as you are, at all events, old enough
to be her father, I dont mind agreeing that we both regard Miss
Vivie in a parental way, as a young girl who we are bound to
protect and help.  What do you say?

CROFTS [aggressively] I'm no older than you, if you come to that.

PRAED.  Yes you are, my dear fellow: you were born old.  I was
born a boy: Ive never been able to feel the assurance of a grown-
up man in my life.  [He folds his chair and carries it to the
porch].

MRS WARREN [calling from within the cottage] Prad-dee!  George! 
Tea-ea-ea-ea!

CROFTS [hastily] She's calling us. [He hurries in].

[Praed shakes his head bodingly, and is following Crofts when he
is hailed by a young gentleman who has just appeared on the
common, and is making for the gate.  He is pleasant, pretty,
smartly dressed, cleverly good-for-nothing, not long turned 20,
with a charming voice and agreeably disrespectful manners.  He
carries a light sporting magazine rifle.]

THE YOUNG GENTLEMAN.  Hallo!  Praed!

PRAED.  Why, Frank Gardner!  [Frank comes in and shakes hands
cordially].  What on earth are you doing here?

FRANK.  Staying with my father.

PRAED.  The Roman father?

FRANK.  He's rector here.  I'm living with my people this autumn
for the sake of economy.  Things came to a crisis in July: the
Roman father had to pay my debts.  He's stony broke in
consequence; and so am I.  What are you up to in these parts?  do
you know the people here?

PRAED.  Yes: I'm spending the day with a Miss Warren.

FRANK [enthusiastically] What!  Do you know Vivie?  Isnt she a
jolly girl?  I'm teaching her to shoot with this [putting down
the rifle].  I'm so glad she knows you: youre just the sort of
fellow she ought to know.  [He smiles, and raises the charming
voice almost to a singing tone as he exclaims] It's e v e r so
jolly to find you here, Praed.

PRAED.  I'm an old friend of her mother.  Mrs Warren brought me
over to make her daughter's acquaintance.

FRANK.  The mother!  Is s h e here?

PRAED.  Yes: inside, at tea.

MRS WARREN [calling from within] Prad-dee-ee-ee-eee!  The tea-
cake'll be cold.

PRAED [calling]  Yes, Mrs Warren.  In a moment.  Ive just met a
friend here.

MRS WARREN.  A what?

PRAED [louder] A friend.

MRS WARREN.  Bring him in.

PRAED.  All right.  [To Frank] Will you accept the invitation?

FRANK [incredulous, but immensely amused] Is that Vivie's mother?

PRAED.  Yes.

FRANK.  By Jove!  What a lark!  Do you think she'll like me?

PRAED.  Ive no doubt youll make yourself popular, as usual.  Come
in and try [moving towards the house].

FRANK.  Stop a bit.  [Seriously] I want to take you into my
confidence.

PRAED.  Pray dont.  It's only some fresh folly, like the barmaid
at Redhill.

FRANK.  It's ever so much more serious than that.  You say youve
only just met Vivie for the first time?

PRAED.  Yes.

FRANK [rhapsodically] Then you can have no idea what a girl she
is.  Such character!  Such sense!  And her cleverness!  Oh, my
eye, Praed, but I can tell you she is clever!  And--need I add?--
she loves me.

CROFTS [putting his head out of the window] I say, Praed: what
are you about?  Do come along.  [He disappears].

FRANK.  Hallo!  Sort of chap that would take a prize at a dog
show, aint he?  Who's he?

PRAED.  Sir George Crofts, an old friend of Mrs Warren's.  I
think we had better come in.

[On their way to the porch they are interrupted by a call from
the gate.  Turning, they see an elderly clergyman looking over
it.]

THE CLERGYMAN [calling] Frank!

FRANK.  Hallo!  [To Praed] The Roman father.  [To the clergyman] 
Yes, gov'nor: all right: presently.  [To Praed] Look here, Praed:
youd better go in to tea.  I'll join you directly.

PRAED.  Very good.  [He goes into the cottage].

[The clergyman remains outside the gate, with his hands on the
top of it.  The Rev. Samuel Gardner, a beneficed clergyman of the
Established Church, is over 50.  Externally he is pretentious,
booming, noisy, important.  Really he is that obsolescent
phenomenon the fool of the family dumped on the Church by his
father the patron, clamorously asserting himself as father and
clergyman without being able to command respect in either
capacity.]

REV. S.  Well, sir.  Who are your friends here, if I may ask?

FRANK.  Oh, it's all right, gov'nor!  Come in.

REV. S.  No, sir; not until I know whose garden I am entering.

FRANK.  It's all right.  It's Miss Warren's.

REV. S.  I have not seen her at church since she came.

FRANK.  Of course not: she's a third wrangler.  Ever so
intellectual.  Took a higher degree than you did; so why should
she go to hear you preach?

REV. S.  Dont be disrespectful, sir.

FRANK.  Oh, it dont matter: nobody hears us.  Come in.  [He opens
the gate, unceremoniously pulling his father with it into the
garden].  I want to introduce you to her.  Do you remember the
advice you gave me last July, gov'nor?

REV. S. [severely] Yes.  I advised you to conquer your idleness
and flippancy, and to work your way into an honorable profession
and live on it and not upon me.

FRANK.  No: thats what you thought of afterwards.  What you
actually said was that since I had neither brains nor money, I'd
better turn my good looks to account by marrying someone with
both.  Well, look here.  Miss Warren has brains: you cant deny
that.

REV. S.  Brains are not everything.

FRANK.  No, of course not: theres the money--

REV. S. [interrupting him austerely] I was not thinking of money,
sir.  I was speaking of higher things.  Social position, for
instance.

FRANK.  I dont care a rap about that.

REV. S.  But I do, sir.

FRANK.  Well, nobody wants y o u to marry her.  Anyhow, she has
what amounts to a high Cambridge degree; and she seems to have as
much money as she wants.

REV. S. [sinking into a feeble vein of humor] I greatly doubt
whether she has as much money as y o u will want.

FRANK.  Oh, come: I havnt been so very extravagant.  I live ever
so quietly; I dont drink; I dont bet much; and I never go
regularly to the razzle-dazzle as you did when you were my age.

REV. S. [booming hollowly] Silence, sir.

FRANK.  Well, you told me yourself, when I was making every such
an ass of myself about the barmaid at Redhill, that you once
offered a woman fifty pounds for the letters you wrote to her
when--

REV. S. [terrified] Sh-sh-sh, Frank, for Heaven's sake!  [He
looks round apprehensively  Seeing no one within earshot he
plucks up courage to boom again, but more subduedly].  You are
taking an ungentlemanly advantage of what I confided to you for
your own good, to save you from an error you would have repented
all your life long.  Take warning by your father's follies, sir;
and dont make them an excuse for your own.

FRANK.  Did you ever hear the story of the Duke of Wellington and
his letters?

REV. S.  No, sir; and I dont want to hear it.

FRANK.  The old Iron Duke didnt throw away fifty pounds: not he. 
He just wrote: "Dear Jenny: publish and be damned!  Yours
affectionately, Wellington."  Thats what you should have done.

REV. S. [piteously] Frank, my boy,: when I wrote those letters I
put myself into that woman's power.  When I told you about them I
put myself, to some extent, I am sorry to say, in your power. 
She refused my money with these words, which I shall never
forget.  "Knowledge is power" she said; "and I never sell power."

Thats more than twenty years ago; and she has never made use of
her power or caused me a moment's uneasiness.  You are behaving
worse to me than she did, Frank.

FRANK.  Oh yes I dare say!  Did you ever preach at her the way
you preach at me every day?

REV. S. [wounded almost to tears] I leave you, sir.  You are
incorrigible.  [He turns towards the gate].

FRANK [utterly unmoved] Tell them I shant be home to tea, will
you, gov'nor, like a good fellow?  [He moves towards the cottage
door and is met by Praed and Vivie coming out].

VIVIE [to Frank] Is that your father, Frank?  I do so want to
meet him.

FRANK.  Certainly.  [Calling after his father] Gov'nor.  Youre
wanted.  [The parson turns at the gate, fumbling nervously at his
hat.  Praed crosses the garden to the opposite side, beaming in
anticipation of civilities].  My father: Miss Warren.

VIVIE [going to the clergyman and shaking his hand] Very glad to
see you here, Mr Gardner.  [Calling to the cottage] Mother: come
along: youre wanted.

[Mrs Warren appears on the threshold, and is immediately
transfixed, recognizing the clergyman.]

VIVIE [continuing] Let me introduce--

MRS WARREN [swooping on the Reverend Samuel] Why it's Sam
Gardner, gone into the Church!  Well, I never!  Dont you know us,
Sam?  This is George Crofts, as large as life and twice as
natural.  Dont you remember me?

REV. S. [very red] I really--er--

MRS WARREN.  Of course you do.  Why, I have a whole album of your
letters still: I came across them only the other day.

REV. S. [miserably confused] Miss Vavasour, I believe.

MRS WARREN [correcting him quickly in a loud whisper] Tch! 
Nonsense!  Mrs Warren: dont you see my daughter there?



ACT II


[Inside the cottage after nightfall.  Looking eastward from
within instead of westward from without, the latticed window,
with its curtains drawn, is now seen in the middle of the front
wall of the cottage, with the porch door to the left of it.  In
the left-hand side wall is the door leading to the kitchen. 
Farther back against the same wall is a dresser with a candle and
matches on it, and Frank's rifle standing beside them, with the
barrel resting in the plate-rack.  In the centre a table stands
with a lighted lamp on it.  Vivie's books and writing materials
are on a table to the right of the window, against the wall.  The
fireplace is on the right, with a settle: there is no fire.  Two
of the chairs are set right and left of the table.]

[The cottage door opens, shewing a fine starlit night without;
and Mrs Warren, her shoulders wrapped in a shawl borrowed from
Vivie, enters, followed by Frank, who throws his cap on the
window seat.  She has had enough of walking, and gives a gasp of
relief as she unpins her hat; takes it off; sticks the pin
through the crown; and puts it on the table.]

MRS WARREN.  O Lord!  I dont know which is the worst of the
country, the walking or the sitting at home with nothing to do. 
I could do with a whisky and soda now very well, if only they had
such a things in this place.

FRANK.  Perhaps Vivie's got some.

MRS WARREN.  Nonsense!  What would a young girl like her be doing
with such things!  Never mind: it dont matter.  I wonder how she
passes her time here!  I'd a good deal rather be in Vienna.

FRANK.  Let me take you there.  [He helps her to take off her
shawl, gallantly giving her shoulders a very perceptible squeeze
as he does so].

MRS WARREN.  Ah! would you?  I'm beginning to think youre a chip
of the old block.

FRANK.  Like the gov'nor, eh?  [He hangs the shawl on the nearest
chair, and sits down].

MRS WARREN.  Never you mind.  What do you know about such things?

Youre only a boy.  [She goes to the hearth to be farther from
temptation].

FRANK.  Do come to Vienna with me?  It'd be ever such larks.

MRS WARREN.  No, thank you.  Vienna is no place for you--at least
not until youre a little older.  [She nods at him to emphasize
this piece of advice.  He makes a mock-piteous face, belied by
his laughing eyes.  She looks at him; then comes back to him]. 
Now, look here, little boy [taking his face in her hands and
turning it up to her]: I know you through and through by your
likeness to your father, better than you know yourself.  Dont you
go taking any silly ideas into your head about me.  Do you hear?

FRANK [gallantly wooing her with his voice] Cant help it, my dear
Mrs Warren: it runs in the family.

[She pretends to box his ears; then looks at the pretty laughing
upturned face of a moment, tempted.  At last she kisses him, and
immediately turns away, out of patience with herself.]

MRS WARREN.  There!  I shouldnt have done that.  I a m wicked. 
Never you mind, my dear: it's only a motherly kiss.  Go and make
love to Vivie.

FRANK.  So I have.

MRS WARREN [turning on him with a sharp note of alarm in her
voice] What!

FRANK.  Vivie and I are ever such chums.

MRS WARREN.  What do you mean?  Now see here: I wont have any
young scamp tampering with my little girl.  Do you hear?  I wont
have it.

FRANK [quite unabashed] My dear Mrs Warren: dont you be alarmed. 
My intentions are honorable: ever so honorable; and your little
girl is jolly well able to take care of herself.  She dont need
looking after half so much as her mother.  She aint so handsome,
you know.

MRS WARREN [taken aback by his assurance] Well, you have got a
nice healthy two inches of cheek all over you.  I dont know where
you got it.  Not from your father, anyhow.

CROFTS [in the garden] The gipsies, I suppose?

REV. S. [replying] The broomsquires are far worse.

MRS WARREN [to Frank] S-sh!  Remember! youve had your warning.

[Crofts and the Reverend Samuel Gardner come in from the garden,
the clergyman continuing his conversation as he enters.]

REV. S.  The perjury at the Winchester assizes is deplorable.

MRS WARREN.  Well? what became of you two?  And wheres Praddy and
Vivie?

CROFTS [putting his hat on the settle and his stick in the
chimney corner] They went up the hill.  We went to the village. 
I wanted a drink.  [He sits down on the settle, putting his legs
up along the seat].

MRS WARREN.  Well, she oughtnt to go off like that without
telling me.  [To Frank] Get your father a chair, Frank: where are
your manners?  [Frank springs up and gracefully offers his father
his chair; then takes another from the wall and sits down at the
table, in the middle, with his father on his right and Mrs Warren
on his left].  George: where are you going to stay to-night?  You
cant stay here.  And whats Praddy going to do?

CROFTS.  Gardner'll put me up.

MRS WARREN.  Oh, no doubt youve taken care of yourself!  But what
about Praddy?

CROFTS.  Dont know.  I suppose he can sleep at the inn.

MRS WARREN.  Havnt you room for him, Sam?

REV. S.  Well--er--you see, as rector here, I am not free to do
as I like.  Er--what is Mr Praed's social position?

MRS WARREN.  Oh, he's all right: he's an architect.  What an old
stick-in-the-mud you are, Sam!

FRANK.  Yes, it's all right, gov'nor.  He built that place down
in Wales for the Duke.  Caernarvon Castle they call it.  You must
have heard of it.  [He winks with lightning smartness at Mrs
Warren, and regards his father blandly].

REV. S.  Oh, in that case, of course we shall only be too happy. 
I suppose he knows the Duke personally.

FRANK.  Oh, ever so intimately!  We can stick him in Georgina's
old room.

MRS WARREN.  Well, thats settled.  Now if those two would only
come in and let us have supper.  Theyve no right to stay out
after dark like this.

CROFTS [aggressively] What harm are they doing you?

MRS WARREN.  Well, harm or not, I dont like it.

FRANK.  Better not wait for them, Mrs Warren.  Praed will stay
out as long as possible.  He has never known before what it is to
stray over the heath on a summer night with my Vivie.

CROFTS [sitting up in some consternation] I say, you know!  Come!

REV. S. [rising, startled out of his professional manner into
real force and sincerity] Frank, once and for all, it's out of
the question.  Mrs Warren will tell you that it's not to be
thought of.

CROFTS.  Of course not.

FRANK [with enchanting placidity] Is that so, Mrs Warren?

MRS WARREN [reflectively] Well, Sam, I dont know.  If the girl
wants to get married, no good can come of keeping her unmarried.

REV. S. [astounded] But married to h i m!--your daughter to my
son!  Only think: it's impossible.

CROFTS.  Of course it's impossible.  Dont be a fool, Kitty.

MRS WARREN [nettled] Why not?  Isnt my daughter good enough for
your son?

REV. S.  But surely, my dear Mrs Warren, you know the reasons--

MRS WARREN [defiantly] I know no reasons.  If you know any, you
can tell them to the lad, or to the girl, or to your
congregation, if you like.

REV. S. [collapsing helplessly into his chair] You know very well
that I couldnt tell anyone the reasons.  But my boy will believe
me when I tell him there a r e reasons.

FRANK.  Quite right, Dad: he will.  But has your boy's conduct
ever been influenced by your reasons?

CROFTS.  You cant marry her; and thats all about it.  [He gets up
and stands on the hearth, with his back to the fireplace,
frowning determinedly].

MRS WARREN [turning on him sharply] What have you got to do with
it, pray?

FRANK [with his prettiest lyrical cadence] Precisely what I was
going to ask, myself, in my own graceful fashion.

CROFTS [to Mrs Warren] I suppose you dont want to marry the girl
to a man younger than herself and without either a profession or
twopence to keep her on.  Ask Sam, if you dont believe me.  [To
the parson] How much more money are you going to give him?

REV. S.  Not another penny.  He has had his patrimony; and he
spent the last of it in July.  [Mrs Warren's face falls].

CROFTS [watching her] There! I told you.  [He resumes his place
on the settle and puts his legs on the seat again, as if the
matter were finally disposed of].

FRANK [plaintively] This is ever so mercenary.  Do you suppose
Miss Warren's going to marry for money?  If we love one another--

MRS WARREN.  Thank you.  Your love's a pretty cheap commodity, my
lad.  If you have no means of keeping a wife, that settles it;
you cant have Vivie.

FRANK [much amused] What do y o u say, gov'nor, eh?

REV. S.  I agree with Mrs Warren.

FRANK.  And good old Crofts has already expressed his opinion.

CROFTS [turning angrily on his elbow] Look here: I want none of
your cheek.

FRANK [pointedly] I'm e v e r so sorry to surprise you, Crofts;
but you allowed yourself the liberty of speaking to me like a
father a moment ago.  One father is enough, thank you.

CROFTS [contemptuously] Yah!  [He turns away again].

FRANK [rising] Mrs Warren: I cannot give my Vivie up, even for
your sake.

MRS WARREN [muttering] Young scamp!

FRANK [continuing] And as you no doubt intend to hold out other
prospects to her, I shall lose no time in placing my case before
her.  [They stare at him; and he begins to declaim gracefully] He
either fears his fate too much, Or his deserts are small, That
dares not put it to the touch, To gain or lose it all.

[The cottage doors open whilst he is reciting; and Vivie and
Praed come in.  He breaks off.  Praed puts his hat on the
dresser.  There is an immediate improvement in the company's
behavior.  Crofts takes down his legs from the settle and pulls
himself together as Praed joins him at the fireplace.  Mrs Warren
loses her ease of manner and takes refuge in querulousness.]

MRS WARREN.  Wherever have you been, Vivie?

VIVIE [taking off her hat and throwing it carelessly on the
table] On the hill.

MRS WARREN.  Well, you shouldnt go off like that without letting
me know.  How could I tell what had become of you?  And night
coming on too!

VIVIE [going to the door of the kitchen and opening it, ignoring
her mother] Now, about supper?  [All rise except Mrs Warren] We
shall be rather crowded in here, I'm afraid.

MRS WARREN.  Did you hear what I said, Vivie?

VIVIE [quietly] Yes, mother.  [Reverting to the supper
difficulty] How many are we?  [Counting] One, two, three, four,
five, six.  Well, two will have to wait until the rest are done:
Mrs Alison has only plates and knives for four.

PRAED.  Oh, it doesnt matter about me.  I--

VIVIE.  You have had a long walk and are hungry, Mr Praed: you
shall have your supper at once.  I can wait myself.  I want one
person to wait with me.  Frank: are you hungry?

FRANK.  Not the least in the world.  Completely off my peck, in
fact.

MRS WARREN [to Crofts] Neither are you, George.  You can wait.

CROFTS.  Oh, hang it, Ive eaten nothing since tea-time.  Cant Sam
do it?

FRANK.  Would you starve my poor father?

REV. S. [testily] Allow me to speak for myself, sir.  I am
perfectly willing to wait.

VIVIE [decisively] There's no need.  Only two are wanted.  [She
opens the door of the kitchen].  Will you take my mother in, Mr
Gardner.  [The parson takes Mrs Warren; and they pass into the
kitchen.  Praed and Crofts follow.  All except Praed clearly
disapprove of the arrangement, but do not know how to resist it. 
Vivie stands at the door looking in at them].  Can you squeeze
past to that corner, Mr Praed: it's rather a tight fit.  Take
care of your coat against the white-wash: that right.  Now, are
you all comfortable?

PRAED [within] Quite, thank you.

MRS WARREN [within] Leave the door open, dearie.  [Vivie frowns;
but Frank checks her with a gesture, and steals to the cottage
door, which he softly sets wide open].  Oh Lor, what a draught! 
Youd better shut it, dear.

[Vivie shuts it with a slam, and then, noting with disgust that
her mother's hat and shawl are lying about, takes them tidily to
the window seat, whilst Frank noiselessly shuts the cottage
door.]

FRANK [exulting] Aha!  Got rid of em.  Well, Vivvums: what do you
think of my governor?

VIVIE [preoccupied and serious] Ive hardly spoken to him.  He
doesnt strike me as a particularly able person.

FRANK.  Well, you know, the old man is not altogether such a fool
as he looks.  You see, he was shoved into the Church, rather; and
in trying to live up to it he makes a much bigger ass of himself
than he really is.  I dont dislike him as much as you might
expect.  He means well.  How do you think youll get on with him?

VIVIE [rather grimly] I dont think my future life will be much
concerned with him, or with any of that old circle of my
mother's, except perhaps Praed.  [She sits down on the settle]
What do you think of my mother?

FRANK.  Really and truly?

VIVIE.  Yes, really and truly.

FRANK.  Well, she's ever so jolly.  But she's rather a caution,
isnt she?  And Crofts!  Oh, my eye, Crofts!  [He sits beside
her].

VIVIE.  What a lot, Frank!

FRANK.  What a crew!

VIVIE [with intense contempt for them] If I thought that _I_ was
like that--that I was going to be a waster, shifting along from
one meal to another with no purpose, and no character, and no
grit in me, I'd open an artery and bleed to death without one
moment's hesitation.

FRANK.  Oh no, you wouldnt.  Why should they take any grind when
they can afford not to?  I wish I had their luck.  No: what I
object to is their form.  It isnt the thing: it's slovenly, ever
so slovenly.

VIVIE.  Do you think your form will be any better when youre as
old as Crofts, if you dont work?

FRANK.  Of course I do.  Ever so much better.  Vivvums mustnt
lecture: her little boy's incorrigible.  [He attempts to take her
face caressingly in his hands].

VIVIE [striking his hands down sharply] Off with you: Vivvums is
not in a humor for petting her little boy this evening.  [She
rises and comes forward to the other side of the room].

FRANK [following her] How unkind!

VIVIE [stamping at him]  Be serious.  I'm serious.

FRANK.  Good.  Let us talk learnedly, Miss Warren: do you know
that all the most advanced thinkers are agreed that half the
diseases of modern civilization are due to starvation of the
affections of the young.  Now, _I_--

VIVIE [cutting him short] You are very tiresome.  [She opens the
inner door] Have you room for Frank there?  He's complaining of
starvation.

MRS WARREN [within] Of course there is [clatter of knives and
glasses as she moves the things on the table].  Here! theres room
now beside me.  Come along, Mr Frank.

FRANK.  Her little boy will be ever so even with his Vivvums for
this.  [He passes into the kitchen].

MRS WARREN [within] Here, Vivie: come on you too, child.  You
must be famished.  [She enters, followed by Crofts, who holds the
door open with marked deference.  She goes out without looking at
him; and he shuts the door after her].  Why George, you cant be
done: youve eaten nothing.  Is there anything wrong with you?

CROFTS.  Oh, all I wanted was a drink.  [He thrusts his hands in
his pockets, and begins prowling about the room, restless and
sulky].

MRS WARREN.  Well, I like enough to eat.  But a little of that
cold beef and cheese and lettuce goes a long way.  [With a sigh
of only half repletion she sits down lazily on the settle].

CROFTS.  What do you go encouraging that young pup for?

MRS WARREN [on the alert at once] Now see here, George: what are
you up to about that girl?  Ive been watching your way of looking
at her.  Remember: I know you and what your looks mean.

CROFTS.  Theres no harm in looking at her, is there?

MRS WARREN.  I'd put you out and pack you back to London pretty
soon if I saw any of your nonsense.  My girl's little finger is
more to me than your whole body and soul.  [Crofts receives this
with a sneering grin.  Mrs Warren, flushing a little at her
failure to impose on him in the character of a theatrically
devoted mother, adds in a lower key] Make your mind easy: the
young pup has no more chance than you have.

CROFTS.  Maynt a man take an interest in a girl?

MRS WARREN.  Not a man like you.

CROFTS.  How old is she?

MRS WARREN.  Never you mind how old she is.

CROFTS.  Why do you make such a secret of it?

MRS WARREN.  Because I choose.

CROFTS.  Well, I'm not fifty yet; and my property is as good as
it ever was--

MRS [interrupting him] Yes; because youre as stingy as youre
vicious.

CROFTS [continuing] And a baronet isnt to be picked up every day.

No other man in my position would put up with you for a mother-
in-law.  Why shouldnt she marry me?

MRS WARREN.  You!

CROFTS.  We three could live together quite comfortably.  I'd die
before her and leave her a bouncing widow with plenty of money. 
Why not?  It's been growing in my mind all the time Ive been
walking with that fool inside there.

MRS WARREN [revolted] Yes; it's the sort of thing that w o u l d
grow in your mind.

[He halts in his prowling; and the two look at one another, she
steadfastly, with a sort of awe behind her contemptuous disgust:
he stealthily, with a carnal gleam in his eye and a loose grin.]

CROFTS [suddenly becoming anxious and urgent as he sees no sign
of sympathy in her] Look here, Kitty: youre a sensible woman: you
neednt put on any moral airs.  I'll ask no more questions; and
you need answer none.  I'll settle the whole property on her; and
if you want a checque for yourself on the wedding day, you can
name any figure you like--in reason.

MRS WARREN.  So it's come to that with you, George, like all the
other worn-out old creatures!

CROFTS [savagely] Damn you!

[Before she can retort the door of the kitchen is opened; and the
voices of the others are heard returning.  Crofts, unable to
recover his presence of mind, hurries out of the cottage.  The
clergyman appears at the kitchen door.]

REV. S. [looking round] Where is Sir George?

MRS WARREN.  Gone out to have a pipe.  [The clergyman takes his
hat from the table, and joins Mrs Warren at the fireside. 
Meanwhile, Vivie comes in, followed by Frank, who collapses into
the nearest chair with an air of extreme exhaustion.  Mrs Warren
looks round at Vivie and says, with her affectation of maternal
patronage even more forced than usual] Well, dearie: have you had
a good supper?

VIVIE.  You know what Mrs Alison's suppers are.  [She turns to
Frank and pets him] Poor Frank! was all the beef gone? did it get
nothing but bread and cheese and ginger beer?  [Seriously, as if
she had done quite enough trifling for one evening] Her butter is
really awful.  I must get some down from the stores.

FRANK.  Do, in Heaven's name!

[Vivie goes to the writing-table and makes a memorandum to order
the butter.  Praed comes in from the kitchen, putting up his
handkerchief, which he has been using as a napkin.]

REV. S.  Frank, my boy: it is time for us to be thinking of home.

Your mother does not know yet that we have visitors.

PRAED.  I'm afraid we're giving trouble.

FRANK [rising] Not the least in the world: my mother will be
delighted to see you.  She's a genuinely intellectual artistic
woman; and she sees nobody here from one year's end to another
except the gov'nor; so you can imagine how jolly dull it pans out
for her.  [To his father] Y o u r e not intellectual or artistic:
are you pater?  So take Praed home at once; and I'll stay here
and entertain Mrs Warren.  Youll pick up Crofts in the garden. 
He'll be excellent company for the bull-pup.

PRAED [taking his hat from the dresser, and coming close to
Frank] Come with us, Frank.  Mrs Warren has not seen Miss Vivie
for a long time; and we have prevented them from having a moment
together yet.

FRANK [quite softened, and looking at Praed with romantic
admiration] Of course.  I forgot.  Ever so thanks for reminding
me.  Perfect gentleman, Praddy.  Always were.  My ideal through
life.  [He rises to go, but pauses a moment between the two older
men, and puts his hand on Praed's shoulder].  Ah, if you had only
been my father instead of this unworthy old man!  [He puts his
other hand on his father's shoulder].

REV. S. [blustering] Silence, sir, silence: you are profane.

MRS WARREN [laughing heartily] You should keep him in better
order, Sam.  Good-night.  Here: take George his hat and stick
with my compliments.

REV. S. [taking them] Good-night.  [They shake hands.  As he
passes Vivie he shakes hands with her also and bids her good-
night.  Then, in booming command, to Frank] Come along, sir, at
once.  [He goes out].

MRS WARREN.  Byebye, Praddy.

PRAED.  Byebye, Kitty.

[They shake hands affectionately and go out together, she
accompanying him to the garden gate.]

FRANK [to Vivie] Kissums?

VIVIE [fiercely] No.  I hate you.  [She takes a couple of books
and some paper from the writing-table, and sits down with them at
the middle table, at the end next the fireplace].

FRANK [grimacing] Sorry.  [He goes for his cap and rifle.  Mrs
Warren returns.  He takes her hand] Good-night, dear Mrs Warren. 
[He kisses her hand.  She snatches it away, her lips tightening,
and looks more than half disposed to box his ears.  He laughs
mischievously and runs off, clapping-to the door behind him].

MRS WARREN [resigning herself to an evening of boredom now that
the men are gone] Did you ever in your life hear anyone rattle on
so?  Isnt he a tease?  [She sits at the table].  Now that I think
of it, dearie, dont you go encouraging him.  I'm sure he's a
regular good-for-nothing.

VIVIE [rising to fetch more books] I'm afraid so.  Poor Frank!  I
shall have to get rid of him; but I shall feel sorry for him,
though he's not worth it.  That man Crofts does not seem to me to
be good for much either: is he?  [She throws the books on the
table rather roughly].

MRS WARREN [galled by Vivie's indifference] What do you know of
men, child, to talk that way of them?  Youll have to make up your
mind to see a good deal of Sir George Crofts, as he's a friend of
mine.

VIVIE [quite unmoved] Why?  [She sits down and opens a book].  Do
you expect that we shall be much together?  You and I, I mean?

MRS WARREN [staring at her] Of course: until youre married. 
Youre not going back to college again.

VIVIE.  Do you think my way of life would suit you?  I doubt it.

MRS WARREN.  Y o u r way of life!  What do you mean?

VIVIE [cutting a page of her book with the paper knife on her
chatelaine] Has it really never occurred to you, mother, that I
have a way of life like other people?

MRS WARREN.  What nonsense is this youre trying to talk?  Do you
want to shew your independence, now that youre a great little
person at school?  Dont be a fool, child.

VIVIE [indulgently] Thats all you have to say on the subject, is
it, mother?

MRS WARREN [puzzled, then angry] Dont you keep on asking me
questions like that.  [Violently] Hold your tongue.  [Vivie works
on, losing no time, and saying nothing].  You and your way of
life, indeed!  What next?  [She looks at Vivie again.  No reply].

Your way of life will be what I please, so it will.  [Another
pause].  Ive been noticing these airs in you ever since you got
that tripos or whatever you call it.  If you think I'm going to
put up with them, youre mistaken; and the sooner you find it out,
the better.  [Muttering] All I have to say on the subject,
indeed!  [Again raising her voice angrily] Do you know who youre
speaking to, Miss?

VIVIE [looking across at her without raising her head from her
book] No.  Who are you?  What are you?

MRS WARREN [rising breathless] You young imp!

VIVIE.  Everybody knows my reputation, my social standing, and
the profession I intend to pursue.  I know nothing about you. 
What is that way of life which you invite me to share with you
and Sir George Crofts, pray?

MRS WARREN.  Take care.  I shall do something I'll be sorry for
after, and you too.

VIVIE [putting aside her books with cool decision] Well, let us
drop the subject until you are better able to face it.  [Looking
critically at her mother] You want some good walks and a little
lawn tennis to set you up.  You are shockingly out of condition:
you were not able to manage twenty yards uphill today without
stopping to pant; and your wrists are mere rolls of fat.  Look at
mine.  [She holds out her wrists].

MRS WARREN [after looking at her helplessly, begins to whimper]
Vivie--

VIVIE [springing up sharply] Now pray dont begin to cry. 
Anything but that.  I really cannot stand whimpering.  I will go
out of the room if you do.

MRS WARREN [piteously] Oh, my darling, how can you be so hard on
me?  Have I no rights over you as your mother?

VIVIE.  A r e you my mother?

MRS WARREN.  A m I your mother?  Oh, Vivie!

VIVIE.  Then where are our relatives? my father? our family
friends?  You claim the rights of a mother: the right to call me
fool and child; to speak to me as no woman in authority over me
at college dare speak to me; to dictate my way of life; and to
force on me the acquaintance of a brute whom anyone can see to be
the most vicious sort of London man about town.  Before I give
myself the trouble to resist such claims, I may as well find out
whether they have any real existence.

MRS WARREN [distracted, throwing herself on her knees] Oh no, no.

Stop, stop.  I a m your mother: I swear it.  Oh, you cant mean to
turn on me--my own child! it's not natural.  You believe me, dont
you?  Say you believe me.

VIVIE.  Who was my father?

MRS WARREN.  You dont know what youre asking.  I cant tell you.

VIVIE [determinedly] Oh yes you can, if you like.  I have a right
to know; and you know very well that I have that right.  You can
refuse to tell me if you please; but if you do, you will see the
last of me tomorrow morning.

MRS WARREN.  Oh, it's too horrible to hear you talk like that. 
You wouldnt--you c o u l d n t leave me.

VIVIE [ruthlessly] Yes, without a moment's hesitation, if you
trifle with me about this.  [Shivering with disgust] How can I
feel sure that I may not have the contaminated blood of that
brutal waster in my veins?

MRS WARREN.  No, no.  On my oath it's not he, nor any of the rest
that you have ever met.  I'm certain of that, at least.

[Vivie's eyes fasten sternly on her mother as the significance of
this flashes on her.]

VIVIE [slowly] You are certain of that, at l e a s t.  Ah!  You
mean that that is all you are certain of.  [Thoughtfully] I see. 
[Mrs Warren buries her face in her hands].  Dont do that, mother:
you know you dont feel it a bit.  [Mrs Warren takes down her
hands and looks up deplorably at Vivie, who takes out her watch
and says] Well, that is enough for tonight.  At what hour would
you like breakfast?  Is half-past eight too early for you?

MRS WARREN [wildly] My God, what sort of woman are you?

VIVIE [coolly] The sort the world is mostly made of, I should
hope.  Otherwise I dont understand how it gets its business done.

Come [taking her mother by the wrist and pulling her up pretty
resolutely]: pull yourself together.  Thats right.

MRS WARREN [querulously] Youre very rough with me, Vivie.

VIVIE.  Nonsense.  What about bed?  It's past ten.

MRS WARREN [passionately] Whats the use of my going to bed?  Do
you think I could sleep?

VIVIE.  Why not?  I shall.

MRS WARREN.  You! youve no heart.  [She suddenly breaks out
vehemently in her natural tongue--the dialect of a woman of the
people--with all her affectations of maternal authority and
conventional manners gone, and an overwhelming inspiration of
true conviction and scorn in her] Oh, I wont bear it: I wont put
up with the injustice of it.  What right have you to set yourself
up above me like this?  You boast of what you are to me--to m e,
who gave you a chance of being what you are.  What chance had I? 
Shame on you for a bad daughter and a stuck-up prude!

VIVIE [sitting down with a shrug, no longer confident; for her
replies, which have sounded sensible and strong to her so far,
now begin to ring rather woodenly and even priggishly against the
new tone of her mother] Dont think for a moment I set myself
above you in any way.  You attacked me with the conventional
authority of a mother: I defended myself with the conventional
superiority of a respectable woman.  Frankly, I am not going to
stand any of your nonsense; and when you drop it I shall not
expect you to stand any of mine.  I shall always respect your
right to your own opinions and your own way of life.

MRS WARREN.  My own opinions and my own way of life!  Listen to
her talking!  Do you think I was brought up like you? able to
pick and choose my own way of life?  Do you think I did what I
did because I liked it, or thought it right, or wouldnt rather
have gone to college and been a lady if I'd had the chance?

VIVIE.  Everybody has some choice, mother.  The poorest girl
alive may not be able to choose between being Queen of England or
Principal of Newnham; but she can choose between ragpicking and
flowerselling, according to her taste.  People are always blaming
circumstances for what they are.  I dont believe in
circumstances.  The people who get on in this world are the
people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and,
if they cant find them, make them.

MRS WARREN.  Oh, it's easy to talk, isnt it?  Here! would you
like to know what m y circumstances were?

VIVIE.  Yes: you had better tell me.  Wont you sit down?

MRS WARREN.  Oh, I'll sit down: dont you be afraid.  [She plants
her chair farther forward with brazen energy, and sits down. 
Vivie is impressed in spite of herself].  D'you know what your
gran'mother was?

VIVIE.  No.

MRS WARREN.  No, you dont.  I do.  She called herself a widow and
had a fried-fish shop down by the Mint, and kept herself and four
daughters out of it.  Two of us were sisters: that was me and
Liz; and we were both good-looking and well made.  I suppose our
father was a well-fed man: mother pretended he was a gentleman;
but I dont know.  The other two were only half sisters:
undersized, ugly, starved looking, hard working, honest poor
creatures: Liz and I would have half-murdered them if mother
hadnt half-murdered us to keep our hands off them.  They were the
respectable ones.  Well, what did they get by their
respectability?  I'll tell you.  One of them worked in a
whitelead factory twelve hours a day for nine shillings a week
until she died of lead poisoning.  She only expected to get her
hands a little paralyzed; but she died.  The other was always
held up to us as a model because she married a Government laborer
in the Deptford victualling yard, and kept his room and the three
children neat and tidy on eighteen shillings a week--until he
took to drink.  That was worth being respectable for, wasnt it?

VIVIE [now thoughtfully attentive] Did you and your sister think
so?

MRS WARREN.  Liz didnt, I can tell you: she had more spirit.  We
both went to a church school--that was part of the ladylike airs
we gave ourselves to be superior to the children that knew
nothing and went nowhere--and we stayed there until Liz went out
one night and never came back.  I know the schoolmistress thought
I'd soon follow her example; for the clergyman was always warning
me that Lizzie'd end by jumping off Waterloo Bridge.  Poor fool:
that was all he knew about it!  But I was more afraid of the
whitelead factory than I was of the river; and so would you have
been in my place.  That clergyman got me a situation as a
scullery maid in a temperance restaurant where they sent out for
anything you liked.  Then I was a waitress; and then I went to
the bar at Waterloo station: fourteen hours a day serving drinks
and washing glasses for four shillings a week and my board.  That
was considered a great promotion for me.  Well, one cold,
wretched night, when I was so tired I could hardly keep myself
awake, who should come up for a half of Scotch but Lizzie, in a
long fur cloak, elegant and comfortable, with a lot of sovereigns
in her purse.

VIVIE [grimly] My aunt Lizzie!

MRS WARREN.  Yes; and a very good aunt to have, too.  She's
living down at Winchester now, close to the cathedral, one of the
most respectable ladies there.  Chaperones girls at the country
ball, if you please.  No river for Liz, thank you!  You remind me
of Liz a little: she was a first-rate business woman--saved money
from the beginning--never let herself look too like what she was-
-never lost her head or threw away a chance.  When she saw I'd
grown up good-looking she said to me across the bar "What are you
doing there, you little fool? wearing out your health and your
appearance for other people's profit!"  Liz was saving money then
to take a house for herself in Brussels; and she thought we two
could save faster than one.  So she lent me some money and gave
me a start; and I saved steadily and first paid her back, and
then went into business with her as a partner.  Why shouldnt I
have done it?  The house in Brussels was real high class: a much
better place for a woman to be in than the factory where Anne
Jane got poisoned.  None of the girls were ever treated as I was
treated in the scullery of that temperance place, or at the
Waterloo bar, or at home.  Would you have had me stay in them and
become a worn out old drudge before I was forty?

VIVIE [intensely interested by this time] No; but why did you
choose that business?  Saving money and good management will
succeed in any business.

MRS WARREN.  Yes, saving money.  But where can a woman get the
money to save in any other business?  Could y o u save out of
four shillings a week and keep yourself dressed as well?  Not
you.  Of course, if youre a plain woman and cant earn anything
more; or if you have a turn for music, or the stage, or
newspaper-writing: thats different.  But neither Liz nor I had
any turn for such things at all: all we had was our appearance
and our turn for pleasing men.  Do you think we were such fools
as to let other people trade in our good looks by employing us as
shopgirls, or barmaids, or waitresses, when we could trade in
them ourselves and get all the profits instead of starvation
wages?  Not likely.

VIVIE.  You were certainly quite justified--from the business
point of view.

MRS WARREN.  Yes; or any other point of view.  What is any
respectable girl brought up to do but to catch some rich man's
fancy and get the benefit of his money by marrying him?--as if a
marriage ceremony could make any difference in the right or wrong
of the thing!  Oh, the hypocrisy of the world makes me sick!  Liz
and I had to work and save and calculate just like other people;
elseways we should be as poor as any good-for-nothing drunken
waster of a woman that thinks her luck will last for ever.  [With
great energy] I despise such people: theyve no character; and if
theres a thing I hate in a woman, it's want of character.

VIVIE.  Come now, mother: frankly!  Isnt it part of what you call
character in a woman that she should greatly dislike such a way
of making money?

MRS WARREN.  Why, of course.  Everybody dislikes having to work
and make money; but they have to do it all the same.  I'm sure
Ive often pitied a poor girl, tired out and in low spirits,
having to try to please some man that she doesnt care two straws
for--some half-drunken fool that thinks he's making himself
agreeable when he's teasing and worrying and disgusting a woman
so that hardly any money could pay her for putting up with it. 
But she has to bear with disagreeables and take the rough with
the smooth, just like a nurse in a hospital or anyone else.  It's
not work that any woman would do for pleasure, goodness knows;
though to hear the pious people talk you would suppose it was a
bed of roses.

VIVIE.  Still, you consider it worth while.  It pays.

MRS WARREN.  Of course it's worth while to a poor girl, if she
can resist temptation and is good-looking and well conducted and
sensible.  It's far better than any other employment open to her.

I always thought that it oughtnt to be.  It c a n t be right,
Vivie, that there shouldnt be better opportunities for women.  I
stick to that: it's wrong.  But it's so, right or wrong; and a
girl must make the best of it.  But of course it's not worth
while for a lady.  If you took to it youd be a fool; but I should
have been a fool if I'd taken to anything else.

VIVIE [more and more deeply moved] Mother: suppose we were both
as poor as you were in those wretched old days, are you quite
sure that you wouldnt advise me to try the Waterloo bar, or marry
a laborer, or even go into the factory?

MRS WARREN [indignantly] Of course not.  What sort of mother do
you take me for!  How could you keep your self-respect in such
starvation and slavery?  And whats a woman worth? whats life
worth? without self-respect!  Why am I independent and able to
give my daughter a first-rate education, when other women that
had just as good opportunities are in the gutter?  Because I
always knew how to respect myself and control myself.  Why is Liz
looked up to in a cathedral town?  The same reason.  Where would
we be now if we'd minded the clergyman's foolishness?  Scrubbing
floors for one and sixpence a day and nothing to look forward to
but the workhouse infirmary.  Dont you be led astray by people
who dont know the world, my girl.  The only way for a woman to
provide for herself decently is for her to be good to some man
that can afford to be good to her.  If she's in his own station
of life, let her make him marry her; but if she's far beneath him
she cant expect it: why should she? it wouldnt be for her own
happiness.  Ask any lady in London society that has daughters;
and she'll tell you the same, except that I tell you straight and
she'll tell you crooked.  Thats all the difference.

VIVIE [fascinated, gazing at her] My dear mother: you are a
wonderful woman: you are stronger than all England.  And are you
really and truly not one wee bit doubtful--or--or--ashamed?

MRS WARREN.  Well, of course, dearie, it's only good manners to
be ashamed of it: it's expected from a woman.  Women have to
pretend to feel a great deal that they dont feel.  Liz used to be
angry with me for plumping out the truth about it.  She used to
say that when every woman could learn enough from what was going
on in the world before her eyes, there was no need to talk about
it to her.  But then Liz was such a perfect lady!  She had the
true instinct of it; while I was always a bit of a vulgarian.  I
used to be so pleased when you sent me your photos to see that
you were growing up like Liz: youve just her ladylike, determined
way.  But I cant stand saying one thing when everyone knows I
mean another.  Whats the use in such hypocrisy?  If people
arrange the world that way for women, theres no good pretending
it's arranged the other way.  No: I never was a bit ashamed
really.  I consider I had a right to be proud of how we managed
everything so respectably, and never had a word against us, and
how the girls were so well taken care of.  Some of them did very
well: one of them married an ambassador.  But of course now I
darent talk about such things: whatever would they think of us! 
[She yawns].  Oh dear!  I do believe I'm getting sleepy after
all.  [She stretches herself lazily, thoroughly relieved by her
explosion, and placidly ready for her night's rest].

VIVIE.  I believe it is I who will not be able to sleep now. 
[She goes to the dresser and lights the candle.  Then she
extinguishes the lamp, darkening the room a good deal].  Better
let in some fresh air before locking up.  [She opens the cottage
door, and finds that it is broad moonlight].  What a beautiful
night!  Look!  [She draws the curtains of the window.  The
landscape is seen bathed in the radiance of the harvest moon
rising over Blackdown].

MRS WARREN [with a perfunctory glance at the scene] Yes, dear;
but take care you dont catch your death of cold from the night
air.

VIVIE [contemptuously] Nonsense.

MRS WARREN [querulously] Oh yes: everything I say is nonsense,
according to you.

VIVIE [turning to her quickly] No: really that is not so, mother.

You have got completely the better of me tonight, though I
intended it to be the other way.  Let us be good friends now.

MRS WARREN [shaking her head a little ruefully] So it h a s been
the other way.  But I suppose I must give in to it.  I always got
the worst of it from Liz; and now I suppose it'll be the same
with you.

VIVIE.  Well, never mind.  Come: good-night, dear old mother. 
[She takes her mother in her arms].

MRS WARREN [fondly] I brought you up well, didnt I, dearie?

VIVIE.  You did.

MRS WARREN.  And youll be good to your poor old mother for it,
wont you?

VIVIE.  I will, dear.  [Kissing her] Good-night.

MRS WARREN [with unction] Blessings on my own dearie darling! a
mother's blessing!

[She embraces her daughter protectingly, instinctively looking
upward for divine sanction.]



ACT III


[In the Rectory garden next morning, with the sun shining from a
cloudless sky.  The garden wall has a five-barred wooden gate,
wide enough to admit a carriage, in the middle.  Beside the gate
hangs a bell on a coiled spring, communicating with a pull
outside.  The carriage drive comes down the middle of the garden
and then swerves to its left, where it ends in a little gravelled
circus opposite the Rectory porch.  Beyond the gate is seen the
dusty high road, parallel with the wall, bounded on the farther
side by a strip of turf and an unfenced pine wood.  On the lawn,
between the house and the drive, is a clipped yew tree, with a
garden bench in its shade.  On the opposite side the garden is
shut in by a box hedge; and there is a little sundial on the
turf, with an iron chair near it.  A little path leads through
the box hedge, behind the sundial.]

[Frank, seated on the chair near the sundial, on which he has
placed the morning paper, is reading The Standard.  His father
comes from the house, red-eyed and shivery, and meets Frank's eye
with misgiving.]

FRANK [looking at his watch] Half-past eleven.  Nice your for a
rector to come down to breakfast!

REV. S.  Dont mock, Frank: dont mock.  I am a little--er--
[Shivering]--

FRANK.  Off color?

REV. S. [repudiating the expression] No, sir: u n w e l l this
morning.  Wheres your mother?

FRANK.  Dont be alarmed: she's not here.  Gone to town by the
11.13 with Bessie.  She left several messages for you.  Do you
feel equal to receiving them now, or shall I wait til youve
breakfasted?

REV. S.  I h a v e breakfasted, sir.  I am surprised at your
mother going to town when we have people staying with us.  Theyll
think it very strange.

FRANK.  Possibly she has considered that.  At all events, if
Crofts is going to stay here, and you are going to sit up every
night with him until four, recalling the incidents of your fiery
youth, it is clearly my mother's duty, as a prudent housekeeper,
to go up to the stores and order a barrel of whisky and a few
hundred siphons.

REV. S.  I did not observe that Sir George drank excessively.

FRANK.  You were not in a condition to, gov'nor.

REV. S.  Do you mean to say that _I_--?

FRANK [calmly] I never saw a beneficed clergyman less sober.  The
anecdotes you told about your past career were so awful that I
really dont think Praed would have passed the night under your
roof if it hadnt been for the way my mother and he took to one
another.

REV. S.  Nonsense, sir.  I am Sir George Crofts' host.  I must
talk to him about something; and he has only one subject.  Where
is Mr Praed now?

FRANK.  He is driving my mother and Bessie to the station.

REV. S.  Is Crofts up yet?

FRANK.  Oh, long ago.  He hasnt turned a hair: he's in much
better practice than you.  Has kept it up ever since, probably. 
He's taken himself off somewhere to smoke.

[Frank resumes his paper.  The parson turns disconsolately
towards the gate; then comes back irresolutely.]

REV. S.  Er--Frank.

FRANK.  Yes.

REV. S.  Do you think the Warrens will expect to be asked here
after yesterday afternoon?

FRANK.  Theyve been asked already.

REV. S. [appalled] What!!!

FRANK.  Crofts informed us at breakfast that you told him to
bring Mrs Warren and Vivie over here to-day, and to invite them
to make this house their home.  My mother then found she must go
to town by the 11.13 train.

REV. S. [with despairing vehemence] I never gave any such
invitation.  I never thought of such a thing.

FRANK [compassionately] How do you know, gov'nor, what you said
and thought last night?

PRAED [coming in through the hedge] Good morning.

REV. S.  Good morning.  I must apologize for not having met you
at breakfast.  I have a touch of--of--

FRANK.  Clergyman's sore throat, Praed.  Fortunately not chronic.

PRAED [changing the subject] Well I must say your house is in a
charming spot here.  Really most charming.

REV. S.  Yes: it is indeed.  Frank will take you for a walk, Mr
Praed, if you like.  I'll ask you to excuse me: I must take the
opportunity to write my sermon while Mrs Gardner is away and you
are all amusing yourselves.  You wont mind, will you?

PRAED.  Certainly not.  Dont stand on the slightest ceremony with
me.

REV. S.  Thank you.  I'll--er--er-- [He stammers his way to the
porch and vanishes into the house].

PRAED.  Curious thing it must be writing a sermon every week.

FRANK.  Ever so curious, if he did it.  He buys em.  He's gone
for some soda water.

PRAED.  My dear boy: I wish you would be more respectful to your
father.  You know you can be so nice when you like.

FRANK.  My dear Praddy: you forget that I have to live with the
governor.  When two people live together--it dont matter whether
theyre father and son or husband and wife or brother and sister--
they cant keep up the polite humbug thats so easy for ten minutes
on an afternoon call.  Now the governor, who unites to many
admirable domestic qualities the irresoluteness of a sheep and
the pompousness and aggressiveness of a jackass--

PRAED.  No, pray, pray, my dear Frank, remember!  He is your
father.

FRANK.  I give him due credit for that.  [Rising and flinging
down his paper] But just imagine his telling Crofts to bring the
Warrens over here!  He must have been ever so drunk.  You know,
my dear Praddy, my mother wouldnt stand Mrs Warren for a moment. 
Vivie mustnt come here until she's gone back to town.

PRAED.  But your mother doesnt know anything about Mrs Warren,
does she?  [He picks up the paper and sits down to read it].

FRANK.  I dont know.  Her journey to town looks as if she did. 
Not that my mother would mind in the ordinary way: she has stuck
like a brick to lots of women who had got into trouble.  But they
were all nice women.  Thats what makes the real difference.  Mrs
Warren, no doubt, has her merits; but she's ever so rowdy; and my
mother simply wouldnt put up with her.  So--hallo!  [This
exclamation is provoked by the reappearance of the clergyman, who
comes out of the house in haste and dismay].

REV. S.  Frank: Mrs Warren and her daughter are coming across the
heath with Crofts: I saw them from the study windows.  What a m I
to say about your mother?

FRANK.  Stick on your hat and go out and say how delighted you
are to see them; and that Frank's in the garden; and that mother
and Bessie have been called to the bedside of a sick relative,
and were ever so sorry they couldnt stop; and that you hope Mrs
Warren slept well; and--and--say any blessed thing except the
truth, and leave the rest to Providence.

REV. S.  But how are we to get rid of them afterwards?

FRANK.  Theres no time to think of that now.  Here!  [He bounds
into the house].

REV. S.  He's so impetuous.  I dont know what to do with him, Mr
Praed.

FRANK [returning with a clerical felt hat, which he claps on his
father's head].  Now: off with you.  [Rushing him through the
gate].  Praed and I'll wait here, to give the thing an
unpremeditated air.  [The clergyman, dazed but obedient, hurries
off].

FRANK.  We must get the old girl back to town somehow, Praed. 
Come!  Honestly, dear Praddy, do you like seeing them together?

PRAED.  Oh, why not?

FRANK [his teeth on edge] Dont it make your flesh creep ever so
little? that wicked old devil, up to every villainy under the
sun, I'll swear, and Vivie--ugh!

PRAED.  Hush, pray.  Theyre coming.

[The clergyman and Crofts are seen coming along the road,
followed by Mrs Warren and Vivie walking affectionately
together.]

FRANK.  Look: she actually has her arm round the old woman's
waist.  It's her right arm: she began it.  She's gone
sentimental, by God!  Ugh! ugh!  Now do you feel the creeps? 
[The clergyman opens the gate: and Mrs Warren and Vivie pass him
and stand in the middle of the garden looking at the house. 
Frank, in an ecstasy of dissimulation, turns gaily to Mrs Warren,
exclaiming] Ever so delighted to see you, Mrs Warren.  This quiet
old rectory garden becomes you perfectly.

MRS WARREN.  Well, I never!  Did you hear that, George?  He says
I look well in a quiet old rectory garden.

REV. S. [still holding the gate for Crofts, who loafs through it,
heavily bored] You look well everywhere, Mrs Warren.

FRANK.  Bravo, gov'nor!  Now look here: lets have a treat before
lunch.  First lets see the church.  Everyone has to do that. 
It's a regular old thirteenth century church, you know: the
gov'nor's ever so fond of it, because he got up a restoration
fund and had it completely rebuilt six years ago.  Praed will be
able to shew its points.

PRAED [rising] Certainly, if the restoration has left any to
shew.

REV. S. [mooning hospitably at them] I shall be pleased, I'm
sure, if Sir George and Mrs Warren really care about it.

MRS WARREN.  Oh, come along and get it over.

CROFTS [turning back toward the gate] Ive no objection.

REV. S.  Not that way.  We go through the fields, if you dont
mind.  Round here.  [He leads the way by the little path through
the box hedge].

CROFTS.  Oh, all right.  [He goes with the parson].

[Praed follows with Mrs Warren.  Vivie does not stir: she watches
them until they have gone, with all the lines of purpose in her
face marking it strongly.]

FRANK.  Aint you coming?

VIVIE.  No.  I want to give you a warning, Frank.  You were
making fun of my mother just now when you said that about the
rectory garden.  That is barred in the future.  Please treat my
mother with as much respect as you treat your own.

FRANK.  My dear Viv: she wouldnt appreciate it: the two cases
require different treatment.  But what on earth has happened to
you?  Last night we were perfectly agreed as to your mother and
her set.  This morning I find you attitudinizing sentimentally
with your arm around your parent's waist.

VIVIE [flushing] Attitudinizing!

FRANK.  That was how it struck me.  First time I ever saw you do
a second-rate thing.

VIVIE [controlling herself] Yes, Frank: there has been a change:
but I dont think it a change for the worse.  Yesterday I was a
little prig.

FRANK.  And today?

VIVIE [wincing; then looking at him steadily] Today I know my
mother better than you do.

FRANK.  Heaven forbid!

VIVIE.  What do you mean?

FRANK.  Viv: theres a freemasonry among thoroughly immoral people
that you know nothing of.  Youve too much character.  T h a t s
the bond between your mother and me: thats why I know her better
than youll ever know her.

VIVIE.  You are wrong: you know nothing about her.  If you knew
the circumstances against which my mother had to struggle--

FRANK [adroitly finishing the sentence for her] I should know why
she is what she is, shouldnt I?  What difference would that make?

Circumstances or no circumstances, Viv, you wont be able to stand
your mother.

VIVIE [very angry] Why not?

FRANK.  Because she's an old wretch, Viv.  If you ever put your
arm around her waist in my presence again, I'll shoot myself
there and then as a protest against an exhibition which revolts
me.

VIVIE.  Must I choose between dropping your acquaintance and
dropping my mother's?

FRANK [gracefully] That would put the old lady at ever such a
disadvantage.  No, Viv: your infatuated little boy will have to
stick to you in any case.  But he's all the more anxious that you
shouldnt make mistakes.  It's no use, Viv: your mother's
impossible.  She may be a good sort; but she's a bad lot, a very
bad lot.

VIVIE [hotly] Frank--!  [He stands his ground.  She turns away
and sits down on the bench under the yew tree, struggling to
recover her self-command.  Then she says] Is she to be deserted
by the world because she's what you call a bad lot?  Has she no
right to live?

FRANK.  No fear of that, Viv: s h e wont ever be deserted.  [He
sits on the bench beside her].

VIVIE.  But I am to desert her, I suppose.

FRANK [babyishly, lulling her and making love to her with his
voice] Mustnt go live with her.  Little family group of mother
and daughter wouldnt be a success.  Spoil o u r little group.

VIVIE [falling under the spell] What little group?

FRANK.  The babes in the wood: Vivie and little Frank.  [He
nestles against her like a weary child].  Lets go and get covered
up with leaves.

VIVIE [rhythmically, rocking him like a nurse] Fast asleep, hand
in hand, under the trees.

FRANK.  The wise little girl with her silly little boy.

VIVIE.  The deal little boy with his dowdy little girl.

FRANK.  Ever so peaceful, and relieved from the imbecility of the
little boy's father and the questionableness of the little girl's
--

VIVIE [smothering the word against her breast] Sh-sh-sh-sh!
little girl wants to forget all about her mother.  [They are
silent for some moments, rocking one another.  Then Vivie wakes
up with a shock, exclaiming] What a pair of fools we are!  Come:
sit up.  Gracious! your hair.  [She smooths it].  I wonder do all
grown up people play in that childish way when nobody is looking.

I never did it when I was a child.

FRANK.  Neither did I.  You are my first playmate.  [He catches
her hand to kiss it, but checks himself to look around first. 
Very unexpectedly, he sees Crofts emerging from the box hedge]. 
Oh damn!

VIVIE.  Why damn, dear?

FRANK [whispering] Sh!  Here's this brute Crofts.  [He sits
farther away from her with an unconcerned air].

CROFTS.  Could I have a few words with you, Miss Vivie?

VIVIE.  Certainly.

CROFTS [to Frank] Youll excuse me, Gardner.  Theyre waiting for
you in the church, if you dont mind.

FRANK [rising] Anything to oblige you, Crofts--except church.  If
you should happen to want me, Vivvums, ring the gate bell.  [He
goes into the house with unruffled suavity].

CROFTS [watching him with a crafty air as he disappears, and
speaking to Vivie with an assumption of being on privileged terms
with her] Pleasant young fellow that, Miss Vivie.  Pity he has no
money, isnt it?

VIVIE.  Do you think so?

CROFTS.  Well, whats he to do?  No profession.  No property. 
Whats he good for?

VIVIE.  I realize his disadvantages, Sir George.

CROFTS [a little taken aback at being so precisely interpreted]
Oh, it's not that.  But while we're in this world we're in it;
and money's money.  [Vivie does not answer].  Nice day, isnt it?

VIVIE [with scarcely veiled contempt for this effort at
conversation] Very.

CROFTS [with brutal good humor, as if he liked her pluck] Well
thats not what I came to say.  [Sitting down beside her] Now
listen, Miss Vivie.  I'm quite aware that I'm not a young lady's
man.

VIVIE.  Indeed, Sir George?

CROFTS.  No; and to tell you the honest truth I dont want to be
either.  But when I say a thing I mean it; and when I feel a
sentiment I feel it in earnest; and what I value I pay hard money
for.  Thats the sort of man I am.

VIVIE.  It does you great credit, I'm sure.

CROFTS.  Oh, I dont mean to praise myself.  I have my faults,
Heaven knows: no man is more sensible of that than I am.  I know
I'm not perfect: thats one of the advantages of being a middle-
aged man; for I'm not a young man, and I know it.  But my code is
a simple one, and, I think, a good one.  Honor between man and
man; fidelity between man and woman; and no cant about this
religion or that religion, but an honest belief that things are
making for good on the whole.

VIVIE [with biting irony] "A power, not ourselves, that makes for
righteousness," eh?

CROFTS [taking her seriously] Oh certainly.  Not ourselves, of
course.  Y o u understand what I mean.  Well, now as to practical
matters.  You may have an idea that Ive flung my money about; but
I havnt: I'm richer today than when I first came into the
property.  Ive used my knowledge of the world to invest my money
in ways that other men have overlooked; and whatever else I may
be, I'm a safe man from the money point of view.

VIVIE.  It's very kind of you to tell me all this.

CROFTS.  Oh well, come, Miss Vivie: you neednt pretend you dont
see what I'm driving at.  I want to settle down with a Lady
Crofts.  I suppose you think me very blunt, eh?

VIVIE.  Not at all: I am very much obliged to you for being so
definite and business-like.  I quite appreciate the offer: the
money, the position, L a d y  C r o f t s, and so on.  But I
think I will say no, if you dont mind, I'd rather not.  [She
rises, and strolls across to the sundial to get out of his
immediate neighborhood].

CROFTS [not at all discouraged, and taking advantage of the
additional room left him on the seat to spread himself
comfortably, as if a few preliminary refusals were part of the
inevitable routine of courtship] I'm in no hurry.  It was only
just to let you know in case young Gardner should try to trap
you.  Leave the question open.

VIVIE [sharply] My no is final.  I wont go back from it.

[Crofts is not impressed.  He grins; leans forward with his
elbows on his knees to prod with his stick at some unfortunate
insect in the grass; and looks cunningly at her.  She turns away
impatiently.]

CROFTS.  I'm a good deal older than you.  Twenty-five years:
quarter of a century.  I shant live for ever; and I'll take care
that you shall be well off when I'm gone.

VIVIE.  I am proof against even that inducement, Sir George. 
Dont you think youd better take your answer?  There is not the
slightest chance of my altering it.

CROFTS [rising, after a final slash at a daisy, and coming nearer
to her] Well, no matter.  I could tell you some things that would
change your mind fast enough; but I wont, because I'd rather win
you by honest affection.  I was a good friend to your mother: ask
her whether I wasnt.  She'd never have make the money that paid
for your education if it hadnt been for my advice and help, not
to mention the money I advanced her.  There are not many men who
would have stood by her as I have.  I put not less than forty
thousand pounds into it, from first to last.

VIVIE [staring at him] Do you mean to say that you were my
mother's business partner?

CROFTS.  Yes.  Now just think of all the trouble and the
explanations it would save if we were to keep the whole thing in
the family, so to speak.  Ask your mother whether she'd like to
have to explain all her affairs to a perfect stranger.

VIVIE.  I see no difficulty, since I understand that the business
is wound up, and the money invested.

CROFTS [stopping short, amazed] Wound up!  Wind up a business
thats paying 35 per cent in the worst years!  Not likely.  Who
told you that?

VIVIE [her color quite gone] Do you mean that it is still--? 
[She stops abruptly, and puts her hand on the sundial to support
herself.  Then she gets quickly to the iron chair and sits down].

What business are you talking about?

CROFTS.  Well, the fact is it's not what would considered exactly
a high-class business in my set--the country set, you know--o u r
set it will be if you think better of my offer.  Not that theres
any mystery about it: dont think that.  Of course you know by
your mother's being in it that it's perfectly straight and
honest.  Ive known her for many years; and I can say of her that
she'd cut off her hands sooner than touch anything that was not
what it ought to be.  I'll tell you all about it if you like.  I
dont know whether youve found in travelling how hard it is to
find a really comfortable private hotel.

VIVIE [sickened, averting her face] Yes: go on.

CROFTS.  Well, thats all it is.  Your mother has got a genius for
managing such things.  We've got two in Brussels, one in Ostend,
one in Vienna, and two in Budapest.  Of course there are others
besides ourselves in it; but we hold most of the capital; and
your mother's indispensable as managing director.  Youve noticed,
I daresay, that she travels a good deal.  But you see you cant
mention such things in society.  Once let out the word hotel and
everybody thinks you keep a public-house.  You wouldnt like
people to say that of your mother, would you?  Thats why we're so
reserved about it.  By the way, youll keep it to yourself, wont
you?  Since it's been a secret so long, it had better remain so.

VIVIE.  And this is the business you invite me to join you in?

CROFTS.  Oh no.  My wife shant be troubled with business.  Youll
not be in it more than youve always been.

VIVIE.  _I_ always been!  What do you mean?

CROFTS.  Only that youve always lived on it.  It paid for your
education and the dress you have on your back.  Dont turn up your
nose at business, Miss Vivie: where would your Newnhams and
Girtons be without it?

VIVIE [rising, almost beside herself] Take care.  I know what
this business is.

CROFTS [starting, with a suppressed oath] Who told you?

VIVIE.  Your partner.  My mother.

CROFTS [black with rage] The old--

VIVIE.  Just so.

[He swallows the epithet and stands for a moment swearing and
raging foully to himself.  But he knows that his cue is to be
sympathetic.  He takes refuge in generous indignation.]

CROFTS.  She ought to have had more consideration for you.  _I_'d
never have told you.

VIVIE.  I think you would probably have told me when we were
married: it would have been a convenient weapon to break me in
with.

CROFTS [quite sincerely] I never intended that.  On my word as a
gentleman I didnt.

[Vivie wonders at him.  Her sense of the irony of his protest
cools and braces her.  She replies with contemptuous self-
possession.]

VIVIE.  It does not matter.  I suppose you understand that when
we leave here today our acquaintance ceases.

CROFTS.  Why?  Is it for helping your mother?

VIVIE.  My mother was a very poor woman who had no reasonable
choice but to do as she did.  You were a rich gentleman; and you
did the same for the sake of 35 per cent.  You are a pretty
common sort of scoundrel, I think.  That is my opinion of you.

CROFTS [after a stare: not at all displeased, and much more at
his ease on these frank terms than on their former ceremonious
ones] Ha! ha! ha! ha!  Go it, little missie, go it: it doesnt
hurt me and it amuses you.  Why the devil shouldnt I invest my
money that way?  I take the interest on my capital like other
people: I hope you dont think I dirty my own hands with the work.

Come! you wouldnt refuse the acquaintance of my mother's cousin
the Duke of Belgravia because some of the rents he gets are
earned in queer ways.  You wouldnt cut the Archbishop of
Canterbury, I suppose, because the Ecclesiastical Commissioners
have a few publicans and sinners among their tenants.  Do you
remember your Crofts scholarship at Newnham?  Well, that was
founded by my brother the M.P.  He gets his 22 per cent out of a
factory with 600 girls in it, and not one of them getting wages
enough to live on.  How d'ye suppose they manage when they have
no family to fall back on?  Ask your mother.  And do you expect
me to turn my back on 35 per cent when all the rest are pocketing
what they can, like sensible men?  No such fool!  If youre going
to pick and choose your acquaintances on moral principles, youd
better clear out of this country, unless you want to cut yourself
out of all decent society.

VIVIE [conscience stricken] You might go on to point out that I
myself never asked where the money I spent came from.  I believe
I am just as bad as you.

CROFTS [greatly reassured] Of course you are; and a very good
thing too!  What harm does it do after all?  [Rallying her
jocularly] So you dont think me such a scoundrel now you come to
think it over.  Eh?

VIVIE.  I have shared profits with you: and I admitted you just
now to the familiarity of knowing what I think of you.

CROFTS [with serious friendliness] To be sure you did.  You wont
find me a bad sort: I dont go in for being superfine
intellectually; but Ive plenty of honest human feeling; and the
old Crofts breed comes out in a sort of instinctive hatred of
anything low, in which I'm sure youll sympathize with me. 
Believe me, Miss Vivie, the world isnt such a bad place as the
croakers make out.  As long as you dont fly openly in the face of
society, society doesnt ask any inconvenient questions; and it
makes precious short work of the cads who do.  There are no
secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses.  In the
class of people I can introduce you to, no lady or gentleman
would so far forget themselves as to discuss my business affairs
or your mothers.  No man can offer you a safer position.

VIVIE [studying him curiously] I suppose you really think youre
getting on famously with me.

CROFTS.  Well, I hope I may flatter myself that you think better
of me than you did at first.

VIVIE [quietly] I hardly find you worth thinking about at all
now.  When I think of the society that tolerates you, and the
laws that protect you! when I think of how helpless nine out of
ten young girls would be in the hands of you and my mother! the
unmentionable woman and her capitalist bully--

CROFTS [livid] Damn you!

VIVIE.  You need not.  I feel among the damned already.

[She raises the latch of the gate to open it and go out.  He
follows her and puts his hand heavily on the top bar to prevent
its opening.]

CROFTS [panting with fury] Do you think I'll put up with this
from you, you young devil?

VIVIE [unmoved] Be quiet.  Some one will answer the bell. 
[Without flinching a step she strikes the bell with the back of
her hand.  It clangs harshly; and he starts back involuntarily. 
Almost immediately Frank appears at the porch with his rifle].

FRANK [with cheerful politeness] Will you have the rifle, Viv; or
shall I operate?

VIVIE.  Frank: have you been listening?

FRANK [coming down into the garden] Only for the bell, I assure
you; so that you shouldnt have to wait.  I think I shewed great
insight into your character, Crofts.

CROFTS.  For two pins I'd take that gun from you and break it
across your head.

FRANK [stalking him cautiously] Pray dont.  I'm ever so careless
in handling firearms.  Sure to be a fatal accident, with a
reprimand from the coroner's jury for my negligence.

VIVIE.  Put the rifle away, Frank: it's quite unnecessary.

FRANK.  Quite right, Viv.  Much more sportsmanlike to catch him
in a trap.  [Crofts, understanding the insult, makes a
threatening movement].  Crofts: there are fifteen cartridges in
the magazine here; and I am a dead shot at the present distance
and at an object of your size.

CROFTS.  Oh, you neednt be afraid.  I'm not going to touch you.

FRANK.  Ever so magnanimous of you under the circumstances! 
Thank you.

CROFTS.  I'll just tell you this before I go.  It may interest
you, since youre so fond of one another.  Allow me, Mister Frank,
to introduce you to your half-sister, the eldest daughter of the
Reverend Samuel Gardner.  Miss Vivie: you half-brother.  Good
morning!  [He goes out through the gate and along the road].

FRANK [after a pause of stupefaction, raising the rifle] Youll
testify before the coroner that it's an accident, Viv.  [He takes
aim at the retreating figure of Crofts.  Vivie seizes the muzzle
and pulls it round against her breast].

VIVIE.  Fire now.  You may.

FRANK [dropping his end of the rifle hastily] Stop! take care. 
[She lets it go.  It falls on the turf].  Oh, youve given your
little boy such a turn.  Suppose it had gone off! ugh!  [He sinks
on the garden seat, overcome].

VIVIE.  Suppose it had: do you think it would not have been a
relief to have some sharp physical pain tearing through me?

FRANK [coaxingly] Take it ever so easy, dear Viv.  Remember: even
if the rifle scared that fellow into telling the truth for the
first time in his life, that only makes us the babes in the woods
in earnest.  [He holds out his arms to her].  Come and be covered
up with leaves again.

VIVIE [with a cry of disgust] Ah, not that, not that.  You make
all my flesh creep.

FRANK.  Why, whats the matter?

VIVIE.  Goodbye.  [She makes for the gate].

FRANK [jumping up] Hallo!  Stop!  Viv!  Viv!  [She turns in the
gateway] Where are you going to?  Where shall we find you?

VIVIE.  At Honoria Fraser's chambers, 67 Chancery Lane, for the
rest of my life.  [She goes off quickly in the opposite direction
to that taken by Crofts].

FRANK.  But I say--wait--dash it!  [He runs after her].



ACT IV


[Honoria Fraser's chambers in Chancery Lane.  An office at the
top of New Stone Buildings, with a plate-glass window,
distempered walls, electric light, and a patent stove.  Saturday
afternoon.  The chimneys of Lincoln's Inn and the western sky
beyond are seen through the window.  There is a double writing
table in the middle of the room, with a cigar box, ash pans, and
a portable electric reading lamp almost snowed up in heaps of
papers and books.  This table has knee holes and chairs right and
left and is very untidy.  The clerk's desk, closed and tidy, with
its high stool, is against the wall, near a door communicating
with the inner rooms.  In the opposite wall is the door leading
to the public corridor.  Its upper panel is of opaque glass,
lettered in black on the outside, FRASER AND WARREN.  A baize
screen hides the corner between this door and the window.]

[Frank, in a fashionable light-colored coaching suit, with his
stick, gloves, and white hat in his hands, is pacing up and down
in the office.  Somebody tries the door with a key.]

FRANK [calling] Come in.  It's not locked.

[Vivie comes in, in her hat and jacket.  She stops and stares at
him.]

VIVIE [sternly] What are you doing here?

FRANK.  Waiting to see you.  Ive been here for hours.  Is this
the way you attend to your business?  [He puts his hat and stick
on the table, and perches himself with a vault on the clerk's
stool, looking at her with every appearance of being in a
specially restless, teasing, flippant mood].

VIVIE.  Ive been away exactly twenty minutes for a cup of tea. 
[She takes off her hat and jacket and hangs them behind the
screen].  How did you get in?

FRANK.  The staff had not left when I arrived.  He's gone to play
cricket on Primrose Hill.  Why dont you employ a woman, and give
your sex a chance?

VIVIE.  What have you come for?

FRANK [springing off the stool and coming close to her] Viv: lets
go and enjoy the Saturday half-holiday somewhere, like the staff.

What do you say to Richmond, and then a music hall, and a jolly
supper?

VIVIE.  Cant afford it.  I shall put in another six hours work
before I go to bed.

FRANK.  Cant afford it, cant we?  Aha!  Look here.  [He takes out
a handful of sovereigns and makes them chink].  Gold, Viv: gold!

VIVIE.  Where did you get it?

FRANK.  Gambling, Viv: gambling.  Poker.

VIVIE.  Pah!  It's meaner than stealing it.  No: I'm not coming. 
[She sits down to work at the table, with her back to the glass
door, and begins turning over the papers].

FRANK [remonstrating piteously] But, my dear Viv, I want to talk
to you ever so seriously.

VIVIE.  Very well: sit down in Honoria's chair and talk here.  I
like ten minutes chat after tea.  [He murmurs].  No use groaning:
I'm inexorable.  [He takes the opposite seat disconsolately]. 
Pass that cigar box, will you?

FRANK [pushing the cigar box across] Nasty womanly habit.  Nice
men dont do it any longer.

VIVIE.  Yes: they object to the smell in the office; and weve had
to take to cigarets.  See!  [She opens the box and takes out a
cigaret, which she lights.  She offers him one; but he shakes his
head with a wry face.  She settles herself comfortably in her
chair, smoking].  Go ahead.

FRANK.  Well, I want to know what youve done--what arrangements
youve made.

VIVIE.  Everything was settled twenty minutes after I arrived
here.  Honoria has found the business too much for her this year;
and she was on the point of sending for me and proposing a
partnership when I walked in and told her I hadnt a farthing in
the world.  So I installed myself and packed her off for a
fortnight's holiday.  What happened at Haslemere when I left?

FRANK.  Nothing at all.  I said youd gone to town on particular
business.

VIVIE.  Well?

FRANK.  Well, either they were too flabbergasted to say anything,
or else Crofts had prepared your mother.  Anyhow, she didnt say
anything; and Crofts didnt say anything; and Praddy only stared. 
After tea they got up and went; and Ive not seen them since.

VIVIE [nodding placidly with one eye on a wreath of smoke] Thats
all right.

FRANK [looking round disparagingly] Do you intend to stick in
this confounded place?

VIVIE [blowing the wreath decisively away, and sitting straight
up] Yes.  These two days have given me back all my strength and
self-possession.  I will never take a holiday again as long as I
live.

FRANK [with a very wry face] Mps!  You look quite happy.  And as
hard as nails.

VIVIE [grimly] Well for me that I am!

FRANK [rising] Look here, Viv: we must have an explanation.  We
parted the other day under a complete misunderstanding.  [He sits
on the table, close to her].

VIVIE [putting away the cigaret] Well: clear it up.

FRANK.  You remember what Crofts said.

VIVIE.  Yes.

FRANK.  That revelation was supposed to bring about a complete
change in the nature of our feeling for one another.  It placed
us on the footing of brother and sister.

VIVIE.  Yes.

FRANK.  Have you ever had a brother?

VIVIE.  No.

FRANK.  Then you dont know what being brother and sister feels
like?  Now I have lots of sisters; and the fraternal feeling is
quite familiar to me.  I assure you my feeling for you is not the
least in the world like it.  The girls will go t h e i r way; I
will go mine; and we shant care if we never see one another
again.  Thats brother and sister.  But as to you, I cant be easy
if I have to pass a week without seeing you.  Thats not brother
and sister.  Its exactly what I felt an hour before Crofts made
his revelation.  In short, dear Viv, it's love's young dream.

VIVIE [bitingly] The same feeling, Frank, that brought your
father to my mother's feet.  Is that it?

FRANK [so revolted that he slips off the table for a moment] I
very strongly object, Viv, to have my feelings compared to any
which the Reverend Samuel is capable of harboring; and I object
still more to a comparison of you to your mother.  [Resuming his
perch] Besides, I dont believe the story.  I have taxed my father
with it, and obtained from him what I consider tantamount to a
denial.

VIVIE.  What did he say?

FRANK.  He said he was sure there must be some mistake.

VIVIE.  Do you believe him?

FRANK.  I am prepared to take his word against Crofts'.

VIVIE.  Does it make any difference?  I mean in your imagination
or conscience; for of course it makes no real difference.

FRANK [shaking his head] None whatever to m e.

VIVIE.  Nor to me.

FRANK [staring] But this is ever so surprising!  [He goes back to
his chair].  I thought our whole relations were altered in your
imagination and conscience, as you put it, the moment those words
were out of that brute's muzzle.

VIVIE.  No: it was not that.  I didnt believe him.  I only wish I
could.

FRANK.  Eh?

VIVIE.  I think brother and sister would be a very suitable
relation for us.

FRANK.  You really mean that?

VIVIE.  Yes.  It's the only relation I care for, even if we could
afford any other.  I mean that.

FRANK [raising his eyebrows like one on whom a new light has
dawned, and rising with quite an effusion of chivalrous
sentiment] My dear Viv: why didnt you say so before?  I am ever
so sorry for persecuting you.  I understand, of course.

VIVIE [puzzled] Understand what?

FRANK.  Oh, I'm not a fool in the ordinary sense: only in the
Scriptural sense of doing all the things the wise man declared to
be folly, after trying them himself on the most extensive scale. 
I see I am no longer Vivvums's little boy.  Dont be alarmed: I
shall never call you Vivvums again--at least unless you get tired
of your new little boy, whoever he may be.

VIVIE.  My new little boy!

FRANK [with conviction] Must be a new little boy.  Always happens
that way.  No other way, in fact.

VIVIE.  None that you know of, fortunately for you.

[Someone knocks at the door.]

FRANK.  My curse upon yon caller, whoe'er he be!

VIVIE.  It's Praed.  He's going to Italy and wants to say
goodbye.  I asked him to call this afternoon.  Go and let him in.

FRANK.  We can continue our conversation after his departure for
Italy.  I'll stay him out.  [He goes to the door and opens it]. 
How are you, Praddy?  Delighted to see you.  Come in.

[Praed, dressed for travelling, comes in, in high spirits.]

PRAED.  How do you do, Miss Warren?  [She presses his hand
cordially, though a certain sentimentality in his high spirits
jars upon her].  I start in an hour from Holborn Viaduct.  I wish
I could persuade you to try Italy.

VIVIE.  What for?

PRAED.  Why, to saturate yourself with beauty and romance, of
course.

[Vivie, with a shudder, turns her chair to the table, as if the
work waiting for her there were a support to her.  Praed sits
opposite to her.  Frank places a chair near Vivie, and drops
lazily and carelessly into it, talking at her over his shoulder.]

FRANK.  No use, Praddy.  Viv is a little Philistine.  She is
indifferent to m y romance, and insensible to m y beauty.

VIVIE.  Mr Praed: once for all, there is no beauty and no romance
in life for me.  Life is what it is; and I am prepared to take it
as it is.

PRAED [enthusiastically] You will not say that if you come with
me to Verona and on to Venice.  You will cry with delight at
living in such a beautiful world.

FRANK.  This is most eloquent, Praddy.  Keep it up.

PRAED.  Oh, I assure you _I_ have cried--I shall cry again, I
hope--at fifty!  At your age, Miss Warren, you would not need to
go so far as Verona.  Your spirits would absolutely fly up at the
mere sight of Ostend.  You would be charmed with the gaiety, the
vivacity, the happy air of Brussels.

VIVIE [springing up with an exclamation of loathing] Agh!

PRAED [rising] Whats the matter?

FRANK [rising] Hallo, Viv!

VIVIE [to Praed, with deep reproach] Can you find no better
example of your beauty and romance than Brussels to talk to me
about?

PRAED [puzzled] Of course it's very different from Verona.  I
dont suggest for a moment that--

VIVIE [bitterly] Probably the beauty and romance come to much the
same in both places.

PRAED [completely sobered and much concerned] My dear Miss
Warren: I-- [looking enquiringly at Frank] Is anything the
matter?

FRANK.  She thinks your enthusiasm frivolous, Praddy.  She's had
ever such a serious call.

VIVIE [sharply] Hold your tongue, Frank.  Dont be silly.

FRANK [sitting down] Do you call this good manners, Praed?

PRAED [anxious and considerate] Shall I take him away, Miss
Warren?  I feel sure we have disturbed you at your work.

VIVIE.  Sit down: I'm not ready to go back to work yet.  [Praed
sits].  You both think I have an attack of nerves.  Not a bit of
it.  But there are two subjects I want dropped, if you dont mind.

One of them [to Frank] is love's young dream in any shape or
form: the other [to Praed] is the romance and beauty of life,
especially Ostend and the gaiety of Brussels.  You are welcome to
any illusions you may have left on these subjects: I have none. 
If we three are to remain friends, I must be treated as a woman
of business, permanently single [to Frank] and permanently
unromantic [to Praed].

FRANK.  I also shall remain permanently single until you change
your mind.  Praddy: change the subject.  Be eloquent about
something else.

PRAED [diffidently] I'm afraid theres nothing else in the world
that I c a n talk about.  The Gospel of Art is the only one I can
preach.  I know Miss Warren is a great devotee of the Gospel of
Getting On; but we cant discuss that without hurting your
feelings, Frank, since you are determined not to get on.

FRANK.  Oh, dont mind my feelings.  Give me some improving advice
by all means: it does me ever so much good.  Have another try to
make a successful man of me, Viv.  Come: lets have it all:
energy, thrift, foresight, self-respect, character.  Dont you
hate people who have no character, Viv?

VIVIE [wincing] Oh, stop, stop.  Let us have no more of that
horrible cant.  Mr Praed: if there are really only those two
gospels in the world, we had better all kill ourselves; for the
same taint is in both, through and through.

FRANK [looking critically at her] There is a touch of poetry
about you today, Viv, which has hitherto been lacking.

PRAED [remonstrating] My dear Frank: arnt you a little
unsympathetic?

VIVIE [merciless to herself] No: it's good for me.  It keeps me
from being sentimental.

FRANK [bantering her] Checks your strong natural propensity that
way, dont it?

VIVIE [almost hysterically] Oh yes: go on: dont spare me.  I was
sentimental for one moment in my life--beautifully sentimental--
by moonlight; and now--

FRANK [quickly] I say, Viv: take care.  Dont give yourself away.

VIVIE.  Oh, do you think Mr Praed does not know all about my
mother?  [Turning on Praed] You had better have told me that
morning, Mr Praed.  You are very old fashioned in your
delicacies, after all.

PRAED.  Surely it is you who are a little old fashioned in your
prejudices, Miss Warren.  I feel bound to tell you, speaking as
an artist, and believing that the most intimate human
relationships are far beyond and above the scope of the law, that
though I know that your mother is an unmarried woman, I do not
respect her the less on that account.  I respect her more.

FRANK [airily] Hear! hear!

VIVIE [staring at him] Is that a l l you know?

PRAED.  Certainly that is all.

VIVIE.  Then you neither of you know anything.  Your guesses are
innocence itself compared with the truth.

PRAED [rising, startled and indignant, and preserving his
politeness with an effort] I hope not.  [More emphatically] I
hope not, Miss Warren.

FRANK [whistles] Whew!

VIVIE.  You are not making it easy for me to tell you, Mr Praed.

PRAED [his chivalry drooping before their conviction] If there is
anything worse--that is, anything else--are you sure you are
right to tell us, Miss Warren?

VIVIE.  I am sure that if I had the courage I should spend the
rest of my life in telling everybody--stamping and branding it
into them until they all felt their part in its abomination as I
feel mine.  There is nothing I despise more than the wicked
convention that protects these things by forbidding a woman to
mention them.  And yet I cant tell you.  The two infamous words
that describe what my mother is are ringing in my ears and
struggling on my tongue; but I cant utter them: the shame of them
is too horrible for me.  [She buries her face in her hands.  The
two men, astonished, stare at one another and then at her.  She
raises her head again desperately and snatches a sheet of paper
and a pen].  Here: let me draft you a prospectus.

FRANK.  Oh, she's mad.  Do you hear, Viv? mad.  Come! pull
yourself together.

VIVIE.  You shall see.  [She writes].  "Paid up capital: not less
than forty thousand pounds standing in the name of Sir George
Crofts, Baronet, the chief shareholder.  Premises at Brussels,
Ostend, Vienna, and Budapest.  Managing director: Mrs Warren";
and now dont let us forget h e r qualifications: the two words. 
[She writes the words and pushes the paper to them].  There!  Oh
no: dont read it: dont!  [She snatches it back and tears it to
pieces; then seizes her head in her hands and hides her face on
the table].

[Frank, who has watched the writing over her shoulder, and opened
his eyes very widely at it, takes a card from his pocket;
scribbles the two words on it; and silently hands it to Praed,
who reads it with amazement, and hides it hastily in his pocket.]

FRANK [whispering tenderly] Viv, dear: thats all right.  I read
what you wrote: so did Praddy.  We understand.  And we remain, as
this leaves us at present, yours ever so devotedly.

PRAED.  We do indeed, Miss Warren.  I declare you are the most
splendidly courageous woman I ever met.

[This sentimental compliment braces Vivie.  She throws it away
from her with an impatient shake, and forces herself to stand up,
though not without some support from the table.]

FRANK.  Dont stir, Viv, if you dont want to.  Take it easy.

VIVIE.  Thank you.  You an always depend on me for two things:
not to cry and not to faint.  [She moves a few steps towards the
door of the inner room, and stops close to Praed to say] I shall
need much more courage than that when I tell my mother that we
have come to a parting of the ways.  Now I must go into the next
room for a moment to make myself neat again, if you dont mind.

PRAED.  Shall we go away?

VIVIE.  No: I'll be back presently.  Only for a moment.  [She
goes into the other room, Praed opening the door for her].

PRAED.  What an amazing revelation!  I'm extremely disappointed
in Crofts: I am indeed.

FRANK.  I'm not in the least.  I feel he's perfectly accounted
for at last.  But what a facer for me, Praddy!  I cant marry her
now.

PRAED [sternly] Frank!  [The two look at one another, Frank
unruffled, Praed deeply indignant].  Let me tell you, Gardner,
that if you desert her now you will behave very despicably.

FRANK.  Good old Praddy!  Ever chivalrous!  But you mistake: it's
not the moral aspect of the case: it's the money aspect.  I
really cant bring myself to touch the old woman's money now.

PRAED.  And was that what you were going to marry on?

FRANK.  What else?  _I_ havnt any money, nor the smallest turn
for making it.  If I married Viv now she would have to support
me; and I should cost her more than I am worth.

PRAED.  But surely a clever bright fellow like you can make
something by your own brains.

FRANK.  Oh yes, a little.  [He takes out his money again].  I
made all that yesterday in an hour and a half.  But I made it in
a highly speculative business.  No, dear Praddy: even if Bessie
and Georgina marry millionaires and the governor dies after
cutting them off with a shilling, I shall have only four hundred
a year.  And he wont die until he's three score and ten: he hasnt
originality enough.  I shall be on short allowance for the next
twenty years.  No short allowance for Viv, if I can help it.  I
withdraw gracefully and leave the field to the gilded youth of
England.  So that settled.  I shant worry her about it: I'll just
send her a little note after we're gone.  She'll understand.

PRAED [grasping his hand] Good fellow, Frank!  I heartily beg
your pardon.  But must you never see her again?

FRANK.  Never see her again!  Hang it all, be reasonable.  I
shall come along as often as possible, and be her brother.  I can
n o t understand the absurd consequences you romantic people
expect from the most ordinary transactions.  [A knock at the
door].  I wonder who this is.  Would you mind opening the door? 
If it's a client it will look more respectable than if I
appeared.

PRAED.  Certainly.  [He goes to the door and opens it.  Frank
sits down in Vivie's chair to scribble a note].  My dear Kitty:
come in: come in.

[Mrs Warren comes in, looking apprehensively around for Vivie. 
She has done her best to make herself matronly and dignified. 
The brilliant hat is replaced by a sober bonnet, and the gay
blouse covered by a costly black silk mantle.  She is pitiably
anxious and ill at ease: evidently panic-stricken.]

MRS WARREN [to Frank] What!  Y o u r e here, are you?

FRANK [turning in his chair from his writing, but not rising]
Here, and charmed to see you.  You come like a breath of spring.

MRS WARREN.  Oh, get out with your nonsense.  [In a low voice]
Where's Vivie?

[Frank points expressively to the door of the inner room, but
says nothing.]

MRS WARREN [sitting down suddenly and almost beginning to cry]
Praddy: wont she see me, dont you think?

PRAED.  My dear Kitty: dont distress yourself.  Why should she
not?

MRS WARREN.  Oh, you never can see why not: youre too innocent. 
Mr Frank: did she say anything to you?

FRANK [folding his note] She m u s t see you, if [very
expressively] you wait til she comes in.

MRS WARREN [frightened] Why shouldnt I wait?

[Frank looks quizzically at her; puts his note carefully on the
ink-bottle, so that Vivie cannot fail to find it when next she
dips her pen; then rises and devotes his attention entirely to
her.]

FRANK.  My dear Mrs Warren: suppose you were a sparrow--ever so
tiny and pretty a sparrow hopping in the roadway--and you saw a
steam roller coming in your direction, would you wait for it?

MRS WARREN.  Oh, dont bother me with your sparrows.  What did she
run away from Haslemere like that for?

FRANK.  I'm afraid she'll tell you if you rashly await her
return.

MRS WARREN.  Do you want me to go away?

FRANK.  No: I always want you to stay.  But I a d v i s e you to
go away.

MRS WARREN.  What!  And never see her again!

FRANK.  Precisely.

MRS WARREN [crying again] Praddy: dont let him be cruel to me. 
[She hastily checks her tears and wipes her eyes].  She'll be so
angry if she sees Ive been crying.

FRANK [with a touch of real compassion in his airy tenderness]
You know that Praddy is the soul of kindness, Mrs Warren. 
Praddy: what do you say?  Go or stay?

PRAED [to Mrs Warren] I really should be very sorry to cause you
unnecessary pain; but I think perhaps you had better not wait. 
The fact is-- [Vivie is heard at the inner door].

FRANK.  Sh!  Too late.  She's coming.

MRS WARREN.  Dont tell her I was crying.  [Vivie comes in.  She
stops gravely on seeing Mrs Warren, who greets her with
hysterical cheerfulness].  Well, dearie.  So here you are at
last.

VIVIE.  I am glad you have come: I want to speak to you.  You
said you were going, Frank, I think.

FRANK.  Yes.  Will you come with me, Mrs Warren?  What do you say
to a trip to Richmond, and the theatre in the evening?  There is
safety in Richmond.  No steam roller there.

VIVIE.  Nonsense, Frank.  My mother will stay here.

MRS WARREN [scared] I dont know: perhaps I'd better go.  We're
disturbing you at your work.

VIVIE [with quiet decision] Mr Praed: please take Frank away. 
Sit down, mother.  [Mrs Warren obeys helplessly].

PRAED.  Come, Frank.  Goodbye, Miss Vivie.

VIVIE [shaking hands] Goodbye.  A pleasant trip.

PRAED.  Thank you: thank you.  I hope so.

FRANK [to Mrs Warren] Goodbye: youd ever so much better have
taken my advice.  [He shakes hands with her.  Then airily to
Vivie] Byebye, Viv.

VIVIE.  Goodbye.  [He goes out gaily without shaking hands with
her].

PRAED [sadly] Goodbye, Kitty.

MRS WARREN [snivelling] --oobye!

[Praed goes.  Vivie, composed and extremely grave, sits down in
Honoria's chair, and waits for her mother to speak.  Mrs Warren,
dreading a pause, loses no time in beginning.]

MRS WARREN.  Well, Vivie, what did you go away like that for
without saying a word to me!  How could you do such a thing!  And
what have you done to poor George?  I wanted him to come with me;
but he shuffled out of it.  I could see that he was quite afraid
of you.  Only fancy: he wanted me not to come.  As if [trembling]
I should be afraid of you, dearie.  [Vivie's gravity deepens]. 
But of course I told him it was all settled and comfortable
between us, and that we were on the best of terms.  [She breaks
down].  Vivie: whats the meaning of this?  [She produces a
commercial envelope, and fumbles at the enclosure with trembling
fingers].  I got it from the bank this morning.

VIVIE.  It is my month's allowance.  They sent it to me as usual
the other day.  I simply sent it back to be placed to your
credit, and asked them to send you the lodgment receipt.  In
future I shall support myself.

MRS WARREN [not daring to understand] Wasnt it enough?  Why didnt
you tell me?  [With a cunning gleam in her eye] I'll double it: I
was intending to double it.  Only let me know how much you want.

VIVIE.  You know very well that that has nothing to do with it. 
From this time I go my own way in my own business and among my
own friends.  And you will go yours.  [She rises].  Goodbye.

MRS WARREN [rising, appalled] Goodbye?

VIVIE.  Yes: goodbye.  Come: dont let us make a useless scene:
you understand perfectly well.  Sir George Crofts has told me the
whole business.

MRS WARREN [angrily] Silly old-- [She swallows an epithet, and
then turns white at the narrowness of her escape from uttering
it].

VIVIE.  Just so.

MRS WARREN.  He ought to have his tongue cut out.  But I thought
it was ended: you said you didnt mind.

VIVIE [steadfastly] Excuse me: I d o mind.

MRS WARREN.  But I explained--

VIVIE.  You explained how it came about.  You did not tell me
that it is still going on [She sits].

[Mrs Warren, silenced for a moment, looks forlornly at Vivie, who
waits, secretly hoping that the combat is over.  But the cunning
expression comes back into Mrs Warren's face; and she bends
across the table, sly and urgent, half whispering.]

MRS WARREN.  Vivie: do you know how rich I am?

VIVIE.  I have no doubt you are very rich.

MRS WARREN.  But you dont know all that that means; youre too
young.  It means a new dress every day; it means theatres and
balls every night; it means having the pick of all the gentlemen
in Europe at your feet; it means a lovely house and plenty of
servants; it means the choicest of eating and drinking; it means
everything you like, everything you want, everything you can
think of.  And what are you here?  A mere drudge, toiling and
moiling early and late for your bare living and two cheap dresses
a year.  Think over it.  [Soothingly] Youre shocked, I know.  I
can enter into your feelings; and I think they do you credit; but
trust me, nobody will blame you: you may take my word for that. 
I know what young girls are; and I know youll think better of it
when youve turned it over in your mind.

VIVIE.  So that's how it is done, is it?  You must have said all
that to many a woman, to have it so pat.

MRS WARREN [passionately] What harm am I asking you to do? 
[Vivie turns away contemptuously.  Mrs Warren continues
desperately] Vivie: listen to me: you dont understand: you were
taught wrong on purpose: you dont know what the world is really
like.

VIVIE [arrested] Taught wrong on purpose!  What do you mean?

MRS WARREN.  I mean that youre throwing away all your chances for
nothing.  You think that people are what they pretend to be: that
the way you were taught at school and college to think right and
proper is the way things really are.  But it's not: it's all only
a pretence, to keep the cowardly slavish common run of people
quiet.  Do you want to find that out, like other women, at forty,
when youve thrown yourself away and lost your chances; or wont
you take it in good time now from your own mother, that loves you
and swears to you that it's truth: gospel truth?  [Urgently]
Vivie: the big people, the clever people, the managing people,
all know it.  They do as I do, and think what I think.  I know
plenty of them.  I know them to speak to, to introduce you to, to
make friends of for you.  I dont mean anything wrong: thats what
you dont understand: your head is full of ignorant ideas about
me.  What do the people that taught you know about life or about
people like me?  When did they ever meet me, or speak to me, or
let anyone tell them about me? the fools!  Would they ever have
done anything for you if I hadnt paid them?  Havnt I told you
that I want you to be respectable?  Havnt I brought you up to be
respectable?  And how can you keep it up without my money and my
influence and Lizzie's friends?  Cant you see that youre cutting
your own throat as well as breaking my heart in turning your back
on me?

VIVIE.  I recognize the Crofts philosophy of life, mother.  I
heard it all from him that day at the Gardners'.

MRS WARREN.  You think I want to force that played-out old sot on
you!  I dont, Vivie: on my oath I dont.

VIVIE.  It would not matter if you did: you would not succeed. 
[Mrs Warren winces, deeply hurt by the implied indifference
towards her affectionate intention.  Vivie, neither understanding
this nor concerning herself about it, goes on calmly] Mother: you
dont at all know the sort of person I am.  I dont object to
Crofts more than to any other coarsely built man of his class. 
To tell you the truth, I rather admire him for being strongminded
enough to enjoy himself in his own way and make plenty of money
instead of living the usual shooting, hunting, dining-out,
tailoring, loafing life of his set merely because all the rest do
it.  And I'm perfectly aware that if I'd been in the same
circumstances as my aunt Liz, I'd have done exactly what she did.

I dont think I'm more prejudiced or straitlaced than you: I think
I'm less.  I'm certain I'm less sentimental.  I know very well
that fashionable morality is all a pretence, and that if I took
your money and devoted the rest of my life to spending it
fashionably, I might be as worthless and vicious as the silliest
woman could possibly be without having a word said to me about
it.  But I dont want to be worthless.  I shouldnt enjoy trotting
about the park to advertize my dressmaker and carriage builder,
or being bored at the opera to shew off a shopwindowful of
diamonds.

MRS WARREN [bewildered] But--

VIVIE.  Wait a moment: Ive not done.  Tell me why you continue
your business now that you are independent of it.  Your sister,
you told me, has left all that behind her.  Why dont you do the
same?

MRS WARREN.  Oh, it's all very easy for Liz: she likes good
society, and has the air of being a lady.  Imagine m e in a
cathedral town!  Why, the very rooks in the trees would find me
out even if I could stand the dulness of it.  I must have work
and excitement, or I should go melancholy mad.  And what else is
there for me to do?  The life suits me: I'm fit for it and not
for anything else.  If I didnt do it somebody else would; so I
dont do any real harm by it.  And then it brings in money; and I
like making money.  No: it's no use: I cant give it up--not for
anybody.  But what need you know about it?  I'll never mention
it.  I'll keep Crofts away.  I'll not trouble you much: you see I
have to be constantly running about from one place to another. 
Youll be quit of me altogether when I die.

VIVIE.  No: I am my mother's daughter.  I am like you: I must
have work, and must make more money than I spend.  But my work is
not your work, and my way is not your way.  We must part.  It
will not make much difference to us: instead of meeting one
another for perhaps a few months in twenty years, we shall never
meet: thats all.

MRS WARREN [her voice stifled in tears] Vivie: I meant to have
been more with you: I did indeed.

VIVIE.  It's no use, mother: I am not to be changed by a few
cheap tears and entreaties any more than you are, I daresay.

MRS WARREN [wildly] Oh, you call a mother's tears cheap.

VIVIE.  They cost you nothing; and you ask me to give you the
peace and quietness of my whole life in exchange for them.  What
use would my company be to you if you could get it?  What have we
two in common that could make either of us happy together?

MRS WARREN [lapsing recklessly into her dialect] We're mother and
daughter.  I want my daughter.  Ive a right to you.  Who is to
care for me when I'm old?  Plenty of girls have taken to me like
daughters and cried at leaving me; but I let them all go because
I had you to look forward to.  I kept myself lonely for you. 
Youve no right to turn on me now and refuse to do your duty as a
daughter.

VIVIE [jarred and antagonized by the echo of the slums in her
mother's voice] My duty as a daughter!  I thought we should come
to that presently.  Now once for all, mother, you want a daughter
and Frank wants a wife.  I dont want a mother; and I dont want a
husband.  I have spared neither Frank nor myself in sending him
about his business.  Do you think I will spare you?

MRS WARREN [violently] Oh, I know the sort you are: no mercy for
yourself or anyone else.  _I_ know.  My experience has done that
for me anyhow: I can tell the pious, canting, hard, selfish woman
when I meet her.  Well, keep yourself to yourself: _I_ dont want
you.  But listen to this.  Do you know what I would do with you
if you were a baby again? aye, as sure as there's a Heaven above
us.

VIVIE.  Strangle me, perhaps.

MRS WARREN.  No: I'd bring you up to be a real daughter to me,
and not what you are now, with your pride and your prejudices and
the college education you stole from me: yes, stole: deny it if
you can: what was it but stealing?  I'd bring you up in my own
house, I would.

VIVIE [quietly] In one of your own houses.

MRS WARREN [screaming] Listen to her! listen to how she spits on
her mother's grey hairs!  Oh, may you live to have your own
daughter tear and trample on you as you have trampled on me.  And
you will: you will.  No woman ever had luck with a mother's curse
on her.

VIVIE.  I wish you wouldnt rant, mother.  It only hardens me. 
Come: I suppose I am the only young woman you ever had in your
power that you did good to.  Dont spoil it all now.

MRS WARREN.  Yes, Heaven forgive me, it's true; and you are the
only one that ever turned on me.  Oh, the injustice of it! the
injustice! the injustice!  I always wanted to be a good woman.  I
tried honest work; and I was slave-driven until I cursed the day
I ever heard of honest work.  I was a good mother; and because I
made my daughter a good woman she turns me out as if I were a
leper.  Oh, if I only had my life to live over again!  I'd talk
to that lying clergyman in the school.  From this time forth, so
help me Heaven in my last hour, I'll do wrong and nothing but
wrong.  And I'll prosper on it.

VIVIE.  Yes: it's better to choose your line and go through with
it.  If I had been you, mother, I might have done as you did; but
I should not have lived one life and believed in another.  You
are a conventional woman at heart.  That is why I am bidding you
goodbye now.  I am right, am I not?

MRS WARREN [taken aback] Right to throw away all my money!

VIVIE.  No: right to get rid of you?  I should be a fool not to. 
Isnt that so?

MRS WARREN [sulkily] Oh well, yes, if you come to that, I suppose
you are.  But Lord help the world if everybody took to doing the
right thing!  And now I'd better go than stay where I'm not
wanted.  [She turns to the door].

VIVIE [kindly] Wont you shake hands?

MRS WARREN [after looking at her fiercely for a moment with a
savage impulse to strike her] No, thank you.  Goodbye.

VIVIE [matter-of-factly] Goodbye.  [Mrs Warren goes out, slamming
the door behind her.  The strain on Vivie's face relaxes; her
grave expression breaks up into one of joyous content; her breath
goes out in a half sob, half laugh of intense relief.  She goes
buoyantly to her place at the writing table; pushes the electric
lamp out of the way; pulls over a great sheaf of papers; and is
in the act of dipping her pen in the ink when she finds Frank's
note.  She opens it unconcernedly and reads it quickly, giving a
little laugh at some quaint turn of expression in it].  And
goodbye, Frank.  [She tears the note up and tosses the pieces
into the wastepaper basket without a second thought.  Then she
goes at her work with a plunge, and soon becomes absorbed in its 
figures].





End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Mrs. Warren's Profession by Shaw