LUCAS. To tell you that this persecution must come to an end. It has
made me desperately wretched for a whole week.
ST. OLPHERTS. Persecution?
LUCAS. Temptation.
ST. OLPHERTS. Dear Lucas, the process of inducing a man to return to
his wife isn't generally described as temptation.
LUCAS. Ah, I won't hear another word of that proposal. [ST. OLPHERTS
shrugs his shoulders.] I say my people are offering me, through you, a
deliberate temptation to be a traitor. To which of these two women--my
wife or--[pointing to the door]--to her--am I really bound now? It
may be regrettable, scandalous, but the common rules of right and wrong
have ceased to apply here. Finally, Duke--and this is my message--I
intend to keep faith with the woman who sat by my bedside in Rome, the
woman to whom I shouted my miserable story in my delirium, the woman
whose calm, resolute voice healed me, hardened me, renewed in me the
desire to live.
ST. OLPHERTS. Ah! Oh, these modern nurses, in their greys, or browns,
and snowy bibs! They have much to answer for, dear Lucas.
LUCAS. No, no! Why will you persist, all of you, in regarding this as a
mere morbid infatuation, bred in the fumes of pastilles? It isn't so!
Laugh, if you care to; but this is a meeting of affinities, of the
solitary man and the truly sympathetic woman.
ST. OLPHERTS. And oh--oh these sympathetic women!
LUCAS. No! Oh, the unsympathetic women! There you have the cause of
half the world's misery. The unsympathetic women--you should have
loved one of them.
ST. OLPHERTS. I dare say I've done that in my time.
LUCAS. Love one of these women--I know!--worship here, yield yourself
to the intoxicating day-dreams that make the grimy world sweeter than
any heaven ever imagined. How you heart leaps with gratitude for your
good fortune! How compassionately you regard your unblest fellow men!
What may you not accomplish with such a mate beside you; how high will
be your aims, how paltry every obstacle that bars your way to them; how
sweet is to be the labour, how divine the rest! Then--you marry her.
Marry her, and in six months, if you've pluck enough to do it, lag
behind your shooting party and blow your brains out, by accident, at
the edge of a turnip-field. You have found out by that time all that
there is to look for--the daily diminishing interest in your doings,
the poorly assumed attention as you attempt to talk over some plan for
the future; then the yawn, and by degrees, the covert sneer, the little
sarcasm, and finally, the frank, open stare of boredom. Ah, Duke, when
you all carry out your repressive legislation against women of evil
lives, don't fail to include in your schedule the Unsympathetic Wives.
They are the women whose victims show the sorriest scars; they are the
really "bad women" of the world: all the others are snow-white in
comparison!
ST. OLPHERTS. Yes, you've got a good deal of this in that capital Essay
you quoted from this morning. Dear fellow, I admit your home
discomforts; but to jump out of the frying pan into this confounded--
what does she call it?--compact!
LUCAS. Compact?
ST. OLPHERTS. A vague reference, as I understand, to your joint crusade
against the blessed institution of Marriage.
LUCAS. [An alteration in his manner.] Oh--ho, that idea! What--what
has she been saying to you?
ST. OLPHERTS. Incidentally she pitched into me, dear Lucas; she
attacked my moral character. You must have been telling tales.