It is eight o'clock in the evening.The curtains are drawn and the lamps lighted in the drawing room of Her flat in Cromwell Road.Her lover,a beautiful youth of eighteen,in evening dress and cape,with a bunch of flowers and an opera hat in his hands,comes in alone.The door is near the corner;and as he appears in the doorway,he has the fireplace on the nearest wall to his right,and the grand piano along the opposite wall to his left.Near the fireplace a small ornamental table has on it a hand mirror,a fan,a pair of long white gloves,and a little white woollen cloud to wrap a woman's head in.On the other side of the room,near the piano,is a broad,square,softly up-holstered stool.The room is furnished in the most approved South Kensington fashion:that is,it is as like a show room as possible,and is intended to demonstrate the racial position and spending powers of its owners,and not in the least to make them comfortable.
He is,be it repeated,a very beautiful youth,moving as in a dream,walking as on air.He puts his flowers down carefully on the table beside the fan;takes off his cape,and,as there is no room on the table for it,takes it to the piano;puts his hat on the cape;crosses to the hearth;looks at his watch;puts it up again;notices the things on the table;lights up as if he saw heaven opening before him;goes to the table and takes the cloud in both hands,nestling his nose into its softness and kissing it;kisses the gloves one after another;kisses the fan:gasps a long shuddering sigh of ecstasy;sits down on the stool and presses his hands to his eyes to shut out reality and dream a little;takes his hands down and shakes his head with a little smile of rebuke for his folly;catches sight of a speck of dust on his shoes and hastily and carefully brushes it off with his handkerchief;rises and takes the hand mirror from the table to make sure of his tie with the gravest anxiety;and is looking at his watch again when She comes in,much flustered.As she is dressed for the theatre;has spoilt,petted ways;and wears many diamonds,she has an air of being a young and beautiful woman;but as a matter of hard fact,she is,dress and pretensions apart,a very ordinary South Kensington female of about 37,hopelessly inferior in physical and spiritual distinction to the beautiful youth,who hastily puts down the mirror as she enters.
HE [kissing her hand]At last!
SHE.Henry:something dreadful has happened.
HE.What's the matter?
SHE.I have lost your poems.
HE.They were unworthy of you.I will write you some more.
SHE.No,thank you.Never any more poems for me.Oh,how could Ihave been so mad!so rash!so imprudent!
HE.Thank Heaven for your madness,your rashness,your imprudence!
SHE [impatiently]Oh,be sensible,Henry.Can't you see what a terrible thing this is for me?Suppose anybody finds these poems!
What will they think?
HE.They will think that a man once loved a woman more devotedly than ever man loved woman before.But they will not know what man it was.
SHE.What good is that to me if everybody will know what woman it was?
HE.But how will they know?
SHE.How will they know!Why,my name is all over them:my silly,unhappy name.Oh,if I had only been christened Mary Jane,or Gladys Muriel,or Beatrice,or Francesca,or Guinevere,or something quite common!But Aurora!Aurora!I'm the only Aurora in London;and everybody knows it.I believe I'm the only Aurora in the world.And it's so horribly easy to rhyme to it!Oh,Henry,why didn't you try to restrain your feelings a little in common consideration for me?Why didn't you write with some little reserve?
HE.Write poems to you with reserve!You ask me that!
SHE [with perfunctory tenderness]Yes,dear,of course it was very nice of you;and I know it was my own fault as much as yours.I ought to have noticed that your verses ought never to have been addressed to a married woman.
HE.Ah,how I wish they had been addressed to an unmarried woman!
How I wish they had!
SHE.Indeed you have no right to wish anything of the sort.They are quite unfit for anybody but a married woman.That's just the difficulty.What will my sisters-in-law think of them?
HE [painfully jarred]Have you got sisters-in-law?
SHE.Yes,of course I have.Do you suppose I am an angel?
HE [biting his lips]I do.Heaven help me,I do--or I did--or [he almost chokes a sob].
SHE [softening and putting her hand caressingly on his shoulder]
Listen to me,dear.It's very nice of you to live with me in a dream,and to love me,and so on;but I can't help my husband having disagreeable relatives,can I?
HE [brightening up]Ah,of course they are your husband's relatives:I forgot that.Forgive me,Aurora.[He takes her hand from his shoulder and kisses it.She sits down on the stool.He remains near the table,with his back to it,smiling fatuously down at her].
SHE.The fact is,Teddy's got nothing but relatives.He has eight sisters and six half-sisters,and ever so many brothers--but Idon't mind his brothers.Now if you only knew the least little thing about the world,Henry,you'd know that in a large family,though the sisters quarrel with one another like mad all the time,yet let one of the brothers marry,and they all turn on their unfortunate sister-in-law and devote the rest of their lives with perfect unanimity to persuading him that his wife is unworthy of him.They can do it to her very face without her knowing it,because there are always a lot of stupid low family jokes that nobody understands but themselves.Half the time you can't tell what they're talking about:it just drives you wild.
There ought to be a law against a man's sister ever entering his house after he's married.I'm as certain as that I'm sitting here that Georgina stole those poems out of my workbox.
HE.She will not understand them,I think.
SHE.Oh,won't she!She'll understand them only too well.She'll understand more harm than ever was in them:nasty vulgar-minded cat!
HE [going to her]Oh don't,don't think of people in that way.