George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950), was an Irish playwright, critic and polemicist whose influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond. He wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as Man and Superman (1902), Pygmalion (1912) and Saint Joan (1923).
With a range incorporating both contemporary satire and historical allegory, Shaw became the leading dramatist of his generation, and in 1925 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. 

Act 1

Roebuck Ramsden is in his study, opening the morning letters. The study, handsomely and solidly furnished, proclaims the man of means. Not a speck of dust is visible: it is clear that there are at least two housemaids and a parlormaid downstairs, and a housekeeper upstairs who does not let them spare elbow-grease. Even the top of Roebuck’s head is polished: on a sunshiny day he could heliograph his orders to distant camps by merely nodding. In no other respect, however, does he suggest the military man. It is in active civil life that men get his broad air of importance, his dignified expectation of deference, his determinate mouth disarmed and refined since the hour of his success by the withdrawal of opposition and the concession of comfort and precedence and power. He is more than a highly respectable man: he is marked out as a president of highly respectable men, a chairman among directors, an alderman among councillors, a mayor among aldermen. Four tufts of iron-grey hair, which will soon be as white as isinglass, and are in other respects not at all unlike it, grow in two symmetrical pairs above his ears and at the angles of his spreading jaws. He wears a black frock coat, a white waistcoat (it is bright spring weather), and trousers, neither black nor perceptibly blue, of one of those indefinitely mixed hues which the modern clothier has produced to harmonize with the religions of respectable men. He has not been out of doors yet to-day; so he still wears his slippers, his boots being ready for him on the hearthrug. Surmising that he has no valet, and seeing that he has no secretary with a shorthand notebook and a typewriter, one meditates on how little our great burgess domesticity has been disturbed by new fashions and methods, or by the enterprise of the railway and hotel companies which sell you a Saturday to Monday of life at Folkestone as a real gentleman for two guineas, first class fares both ways included.

How old is Roebuck? The question is important on the threshold of a drama of ideas; for under such circumstances everything depends on whether his adolescence belonged to the sixties or to the eighties. He was born, as a matter of fact, in 1839, and was a Unitarian and Free Trader from his boyhood, and an Evolutionist from the publication of the Origin of Species. Consequently he has always classed himself as an advanced thinker and fearlessly outspoken reformer.

Sitting at his writing table, he has on his right the windows giving on Portland Place. Through these, as through a proscenium, the curious spectator may contemplate his profile as well as the blinds will permit. On his left is the inner wall, with a stately bookcase, and the door not quite in the middle, but somewhat further from him. Against the wall opposite him are two busts on pillars: one, to his left, of John Bright; the other, to his right, of Mr Herbert Spencer. Between them hang an engraved portrait of Richard Cobden; enlarged photographs of Martineau, Huxley, and George Eliot; autotypes of allegories by Mr G.F. Watts (for Roebuck believed in the fine arts with all the earnestness of a man who does not understand them), and an impression of Dupont’s engraving of Delaroche’s Beaux Artes hemicycle, representing the great men of all ages. On the wall behind him, above the mantelshelf, is a family portrait of impenetrable obscurity.

A chair stands near the writing table for the convenience of business visitors. Two other chairs are against the wall between the busts.

A parlormaid enters with a visitor’s card. Roebuck takes it, and nods, pleased. Evidently a welcome caller.

RAMSDEN : Show him up.

The parlormaid goes out and returns with the visitor.

THE MAID : Mr Robinson.

Mr Robinson is really an uncommonly nice looking young fellow. He must, one thinks, be the jeune premier; for it is not in reason to suppose that a second such attractive male figure should appear in one story. The slim shapely frame, the elegant suit of new mourning, the small head and regular features, the pretty little moustache, the frank clear eyes, the wholesome bloom and the youthful complexion, the well brushed glossy hair, not curly, but of fine texture and good dark color, the arch of good nature in the eyebrows, the erect forehead and neatly pointed chin, all announce the man who will love and suffer later on. And that he will not do so without sympathy is guaranteed by an engaging sincerity and eager modest serviceableness which stamp him as a man of amiable nature. The moment he appears, Ramsden’s face expands into fatherly liking and welcome, an expression which drops into one of decorous grief as the young man approaches him with sorrow in his face as well as in his black clothes. Ramsden seems to know the nature of the bereavement. As the visitor advances silently to the writing table, the old man rises and shakes his hand across it without a word: a long, affectionate shake which tells the story of a recent sorrow common to both.

RAMSDEN : [concluding the handshake and cheering up] Well, well, Octavius, it’s the common lot. We must all face it someday. Sit down.

Octavius takes the visitor’s chair. Ramsden replaces himself in his own.

OCTAVIUS : Yes: we must face it, Mr Ramsden. But I owed him a great deal. He did everything for me that my father could have done if he had lived.

RAMSDEN : He had no son of his own, you see.

OCTAVIUS : But he had daughters; and yet he was as good to my sister as to me. And his death was so sudden! I always intended to thank him—to let him know that I had not taken all his care of me as a matter of course, as any boy takes his father’s care. But I waited for an opportunity and now he is dead—dropped without a moment’s warning. He will never know what I felt. [He takes out his handkerchief and cries unaffectedly].

RAMSDEN : How do we know that, Octavius? He may know it: we cannot tell. Come! Don’t grieve. [Octavius masters himself and puts up his handkerchief]. That’s right. Now let me tell you something to console you. The last time I saw him—it was in this very room—he said to me: “Tavy is a generous lad and the soul of honor; and when I see how little consideration other men get from their sons, I realize how much better than a son he’s been to me.” There! Doesn’t that do you good?

OCTAVIUS : Mr Ramsden: he used to say to me that he had met only one man in the world who was the soul of honor, and that was Roebuck Ramsden.

RAMSDEN : Oh, that was his partiality: we were very old friends, you know. But there was something else he used to say about you. I wonder whether I ought to tell you or not!

OCTAVIUS : You know best.

RAMSDEN : It was something about his daughter.

OCTAVIUS : [eagerly] About Ann! Oh, do tell me that, Mr Ramsden.

RAMSDEN : Well, he said he was glad, after all, you were not his son, because he thought that someday Annie and you—[Octavius blushes vividly]. Well, perhaps I shouldn’t have told you. But he was in earnest.

OCTAVIUS : Oh, if only I thought I had a chance! You know, Mr Ramsden, I don’t care about money or about what people call position; and I can’t bring myself to take an interest in the business of struggling for them. Well, Ann has a most exquisite nature; but she is so accustomed to be in the thick of that sort of thing that she thinks a man’s character incomplete if he is not ambitious. She knows that if she married me she would have to reason herself out of being ashamed of me for not being a big success of some kind.

RAMSDEN : [Getting up and planting himself with his back to the fireplace] Nonsense, my boy, nonsense! You’re too modest. What does she know about the real value of men at her age? [More seriously] Besides, she’s a wonderfully dutiful girl. Her father’s wish would be sacred to her. Do you know that since she grew up to years of discretion, I don’t believe she has ever once given her own wish as a reason for doing anything or not doing it. It’s always “Father wishes me to,” or “Mother wouldn’t like it.” It’s really almost a fault in her. I have often told her she must learn to think for herself.

OCTAVIUS : [shaking his head] I couldn’t ask her to marry me because her father wished it, Mr Ramsden.

RAMSDEN : Well, perhaps not. No: of course not. I see that. No: you certainly couldn’t. But when you win her on your own merits, it will be a great happiness to her to fulfil her father’s desire as well as her own. Eh? Come! you’ll ask her, won’t you?

OCTAVIUS : [with sad gaiety] At all events I promise you I shall never ask anyone else.

RAMSDEN : Oh, you shan’t need to. She’ll accept you, my boy—although [here he suddenly becomes very serious indeed] you have one great drawback.

OCTAVIUS : [anxiously] What drawback is that, Mr Ramsden? I should rather say which of my many drawbacks?

RAMSDEN : I’ll tell you, Octavius. [He takes from the table a book bound in red cloth]. I have in my hand a copy of the most infamous, the most scandalous, the most mischievous, the most blackguardly book that ever escaped burning at the hands of the common hangman. I have not read it: I would not soil my mind with such filth; but I have read what the papers say of it. The title is quite enough for me. [He reads it]. The Revolutionist’s Handbook and Pocket Companion by John Tanner, M.I.R.C., Member of the Idle Rich Class.

OCTAVIUS : [smiling] But Jack—

RAMSDEN : [testily] For goodness’ sake, don’t call him Jack under my roof [he throws the book violently down on the table, Then, somewhat relieved, he comes past the table to Octavius, and addresses him at close quarters with impressive gravity]. Now, Octavius, I know that my dead friend was right when he said you were a generous lad. I know that this man was your schoolfellow, and that you feel bound to stand by him because there was a boyish friendship between you. But I ask you to consider the altered circumstances. You were treated as a son in my friend’s house. You lived there; and your friends could not be turned from the door. This Tanner was in and out there on your account almost from his childhood. He addresses Annie by her Christian name as freely as you do. Well, while her father was alive, that was her father’s business, not mine. This man Tanner was only a boy to him: his opinions were something to be laughed at, like a man’s hat on a child’s head. But now Tanner is a grown man and Annie a grown woman. And her father is gone. We don’t as yet know the exact terms of his will; but he often talked it over with me; and I have no more doubt than I have that you’re sitting there that the will appoints me Annie’s trustee and guardian. [Forcibly] Now I tell you, once for all, I can’t and I won’t have Annie placed in such a position that she must, out of regard for you, suffer the intimacy of this fellow Tanner. It’s not fair: it’s not right: it’s not kind. What are you going to do about it?

OCTAVIUS : But Ann herself has told Jack that whatever his opinions are, he will always be welcome because he knew her dear father.

RAMSDEN : [out of patience] That girl’s mad about her duty to her parents. [He starts off like a goaded ox in the direction of John Bright, in whose expression there is no sympathy for him. As he speaks, he fumes down to Herbert Spencer, who receives him still more coldly] Excuse me, Octavius; but there are limits to social toleration. You know that I am not a bigoted or prejudiced man. You know that I am plain Roebuck Ramsden when other men who have done less have got handles to their names, because I have stood for equality and liberty of conscience while they were truckling to the Church and to the aristocracy. Whitefield and I lost chance after chance through our advanced opinions. But I draw the line at Anarchism and Free Love and that sort of thing. If I am to be Annie’s guardian, she will have to learn that she has a duty to me. I won’t have it: I will not have it. She must forbid John Tanner the house; and so must you.

The parlormaid returns.

OCTAVIUS : But—

RAMSDEN : [calling his attention to the servant] Ssh! Well?

THE MAID : Mr Tanner wishes to see you, sir.

RAMSDEN : Mr Tanner!

OCTAVIUS : Jack!

RAMSDEN : How dare Mr Tanner call on me! Say I cannot see him.

OCTAVIUS : [hurt] I am sorry you are turning my friend from your door like that.

THE MAID : [calmly] He’s not at the door, sir. He’s upstairs in the drawing room with Miss Ramsden. He came with Mrs Whitefield and Miss Ann and Miss Robinson, sir.

Ramsden’s feelings are beyond words.

OCTAVIUS : [grinning] That’s very like Jack, Mr Ramsden. You must see him, even if it’s only to turn him out.

RAMSDEN : [hammering out his words with suppressed fury] Go upstairs and ask Mr Tanner to be good enough to step down here. [The parlormaid goes out; and Ramsden returns to the fireplace, as to a fortified position]. I must say that of all the confounded pieces of impertinence—well, if these are Anarchist manners I hope you like them. And Annie with him! Annie! A— [he chokes].

OCTAVIUS : Yes: that’s what surprises me. He’s so desperately afraid of Ann. There must be something the matter.

Mr John Tanner suddenly opens the door and enters. He is too young to be described simply as a big man with a beard. But it is already plain that middle life will find him in that category. He has still some of the slimness of youth; but youthfulness is not the effect he aims at: his frock coat would befit a prime minister; and a certain high chested carriage of the shoulders, a lofty pose of the head, and the Olympian majesty with which a mane, or rather a huge wisp, of hazel colored hair is thrown back from an imposing brow, suggest Jupiter rather than Apollo. He is prodigiously fluent of speech, restless, excitable (mark the snorting nostril and the restless blue eye, just the thirty-secondth of an inch too wide open), possibly a little mad. He is carefully dressed, not from the vanity that cannot resist finery, but from a sense of the importance of everything he does which leads him to make as much of paying a call as other men do of getting married or laying a foundation stone. A sensitive, susceptible, exaggerative, earnest man: a megalomaniac, who would be lost without a sense of humor.

Just at present the sense of humor is in abeyance. To say that he is excited is nothing: all his moods are phases of excitement. He is now in the panic-stricken phase; and he walks straight up to Ramsden as if with the fixed intention of shooting him on his own hearthrug. But what he pulls from his breast pocket is not a pistol, but a foolscap document which he thrusts under the indignant nose of Ramsden as he exclaims—

TANNER : Ramsden: do you know what that is?

RAMSDEN : [loftily] No, Sir.

TANNER : It’s a copy of Whitefield’s will. Ann got it this morning.

RAMSDEN : When you say Ann, you mean, I presume, Miss Whitefield.

TANNER : I mean our Ann, your Ann, Tavy’s Ann, and now, Heaven help me, my Ann!

OCTAVIUS : [rising, very pale] What do you mean?

TANNER : Mean! [He holds up the will]. Do you know who is appointed Ann’s guardian by this will?

RAMSDEN : [coolly] I believe I am.

TANNER : You! You and I, man. I! I!! I!!! Both of us! [He flings the will down on the writing table].

RAMSDEN : You! Impossible.

TANNER : It’s only too hideously true. [He throws himself into Octavius’s chair]. Ramsden: get me out of it somehow. You don’t know Ann as well as I do. She’ll commit every crime a respectable woman can; and she’ll justify every one of them by saying that it was the wish of her guardians. She’ll put everything on us; and we shall have no more control over her than a couple of mice over a cat.

OCTAVIUS : Jack: I wish you wouldn’t talk like that about Ann.

TANNER : This chap’s in love with her: that’s another complication. Well, she’ll either jilt him and say I didn’t approve of him, or marry him and say you ordered her to. I tell you, this is the most staggering blow that has ever fallen on a man of my age and temperament.

RAMSDEN : Let me see that will, sir. [He goes to the writing table and picks it up]. I cannot believe that my old friend Whitefield would have shown such a want of confidence in me as to associate me with— [His countenance falls as he reads].

TANNER : It’s all my own doing: that’s the horrible irony of it. He told me one day that you were to be Ann’s guardian; and like a fool I began arguing with him about the folly of leaving a young woman under the control of an old man with obsolete ideas.

RAMSDEN : [stupended] My ideas obsolete!!!!!

TANNER : Totally. I had just finished an essay called Down with Government by the Greyhaired; and I was full of arguments and illustrations. I said the proper thing was to combine the experience of an old hand with the vitality of a young one. Hang me if he didn’t take me at my word and alter his will—it’s dated only a fortnight after that conversation—appointing me as joint guardian with you!

RAMSDEN : [pale and determined] I shall refuse to act.

TANNER : What’s the good of that? I’ve been refusing all the way from Richmond; but Ann keeps on saying that of course she’s only an orphan; and that she can’t expect the people who were glad to come to the house in her father’s time to trouble much about her now. That’s the latest game. An orphan! It’s like hearing an ironclad talk about being at the mercy of the winds and waves.

OCTAVIUS : This is not fair, Jack. She is an orphan. And you ought to stand by her.

TANNER : Stand by her! What danger is she in? She has the law on her side; she has popular sentiment on her side; she has plenty of money and no conscience. All she wants with me is to load up all her moral responsibilities on me, and do as she likes at the expense of my character. I can’t control her; and she can compromise me as much as she likes. I might as well be her husband.

RAMSDEN : You can refuse to accept the guardianship. I shall certainly refuse to hold it jointly with you.

TANNER : Yes; and what will she say to that? what does she say to it? Just that her father’s wishes are sacred to her, and that she shall always look up to me as her guardian whether I care to face the responsibility or not. Refuse! You might as well refuse to accept the embraces of a boa constrictor when once it gets round your neck.

OCTAVIUS : This sort of talk is not kind to me, Jack.

TANNER : [rising and going to Octavius to console him, but still lamenting] If he wanted a young guardian, why didn’t he appoint Tavy?

RAMSDEN : Ah! why indeed?

OCTAVIUS : I will tell you. He sounded me about it; but I refused the trust because I loved her. I had no right to let myself be forced on her as a guardian by her father. He spoke to her about it; and she said I was right. You know I love her, Mr Ramsden; and Jack knows it too. If Jack loved a woman, I would not compare her to a boa constrictor in his presence, however much I might dislike her [he sits down between the busts and turns his face to the wall].

RAMSDEN : I do not believe that Whitefield was in his right senses when he made that will. You have admitted that he made it under your influence.

TANNER : You ought to be pretty well obliged to me for my influence. He leaves you two thousand five hundred for your trouble. He leaves Tavy a dowry for his sister and five thousand for himself.

OCTAVIUS : [his tears flowing afresh] Oh, I can’t take it. He was too good to us.

TANNER : You won’t get it, my boy, if Ramsden upsets the will.

RAMSDEN : Ha! I see. You have got me in a cleft stick.

TANNER : He leaves me nothing but the charge of Ann’s morals, on the ground that I have already more money than is good for me. That shows that he had his wits about him, doesn’t it?

RAMSDEN : [grimly] I admit that.

OCTAVIUS : [rising and coming from his refuge by the wall] Mr Ramsden: I think you are prejudiced against Jack. He is a man of honor, and incapable of abusing—

TANNER : Don’t, Tavy: you’ll make me ill. I am not a man of honor: I am a man struck down by a dead hand. Tavy: you must marry her after all and take her off my hands. And I had set my heart on saving you from her!

OCTAVIUS : Oh, Jack, you talk of saving me from my highest happiness.

TANNER : Yes, a lifetime of happiness. If it were only the first half hour’s happiness, Tavy, I would buy it for you with my last penny. But a lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.

RAMSDEN : [violently] Stuff, sir. Talk sense; or else go and waste someone else’s time: I have something better to do than listen to your fooleries [he positively kicks his way to his table and resumes his seat].

TANNER : You hear him, Tavy! Not an idea in his head later than eighteen-sixty. We can’t leave Ann with no other guardian to turn to.

RAMSDEN : I am proud of your contempt for my character and opinions, sir. Your own are set forth in that book, I believe.

TANNER : [eagerly going to the table] What! You’ve got my book! What do you think of it?

RAMSDEN : Do you suppose I would read such a book, sir?

TANNER : Then why did you buy it?

RAMSDEN : I did not buy it, sir. It has been sent me by some foolish lady who seems to admire your views. I was about to dispose of it when Octavius interrupted me. I shall do so now, with your permission. [He throws the book into the waste paper basket with such vehemence that Tanner recoils under the impression that it is being thrown at his head].

TANNER : You have no more manners than I have myself. However, that saves ceremony between us. [He sits down again]. What do you intend to do about this will?

OCTAVIUS : May I make a suggestion?

RAMSDEN : Certainly, Octavius.

OCTAVIUS : Aren’t we forgetting that Ann herself may have some wishes in this matter?

RAMSDEN : I quite intend that Annie’s wishes shall be consulted in every reasonable way. But she is only a woman, and a young and inexperienced woman at that.

TANNER : Ramsden: I begin to pity you.

RAMSDEN : [hotly] I don’t want to know how you feel towards me, Mr Tanner.

TANNER : Ann will do just exactly what she likes. And what’s more, she’ll force us to advise her to do it; and she’ll put the blame on us if it turns out badly. So, as Tavy is longing to see her—

OCTAVIUS : [shyly] I am not, Jack.

TANNER : You lie, Tavy: you are. So let’s have her down from the drawing-room and ask her what she intends us to do. Off with you, Tavy, and fetch her. [Tavy turns to go]. And don’t be long for the strained relations between myself and Ramsden will make the interval rather painful [Ramsden compresses his lips, but says nothing—].

OCTAVIUS : Never mind him, Mr Ramsden. He’s not serious. [He goes out].

RAMSDEN : [very deliberately] Mr Tanner: you are the most impudent person I have ever met.

TANNER : [seriously] I know it, Ramsden. Yet even I cannot wholly conquer shame. We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins. Good Lord, my dear Ramsden, we are ashamed to walk, ashamed to ride in an omnibus, ashamed to hire a hansom instead of keeping a carriage, ashamed of keeping one horse instead of two and a groom-gardener instead of a coachman and footman. The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is. Why, you’re ashamed to buy my book, ashamed to read it: the only thing you’re not ashamed of is to judge me for it without having read it; and even that only means that you’re ashamed to have heterodox opinions. Look at the effect I produce because my fairy godmother withheld from me this gift of shame. I have every possible virtue that a man can have except—

RAMSDEN : I am glad you think so well of yourself.

TANNER : All you mean by that is that you think I ought to be ashamed of talking about my virtues. You don’t mean that I haven’t got them: you know perfectly well that I am as sober and honest a citizen as yourself, as truthful personally, and much more truthful politically and morally.

RAMSDEN : [touched on his most sensitive point] I deny that. I will not allow you or any man to treat me as if I were a mere member of the British public. I detest its prejudices; I scorn its narrowness; I demand the right to think for myself. You pose as an advanced man. Let me tell you that I was an advanced man before you were born.

TANNER : I knew it was a long time ago.

RAMSDEN : I am as advanced as ever I was. I defy you to prove that I have ever hauled down the flag. I am more advanced than ever I was. I grow more advanced every day.

TANNER : More advanced in years, Polonius.

RAMSDEN : Polonius! So you are Hamlet, I suppose.

TANNER : No: I am only the most impudent person you’ve ever met. That’s your notion of a thoroughly bad character. When you want to give me a piece of your mind, you ask yourself, as a just and upright man, what is the worst you can fairly say of me. Thief, liar, forger, adulterer, perjurer, glutton, drunkard? Not one of these names fit me. You have to fall back on my deficiency in shame. Well, I admit it. I even congratulate myself; for if I were ashamed of my real self, I should cut as stupid a figure as any of the rest of you. Cultivate a little impudence, Ramsden; and you will become quite a remarkable man.

RAMSDEN : I have no—

TANNER : You have no desire for that sort of notoriety. Bless you, I knew that answer would come as well as I know that a box of matches will come out of an automatic machine when I put a penny in the slot: you would be ashamed to say anything else.

The crushing retort for which Ramsden has been visibly collecting his forces is lost forever; for at this point Octavius returns with Miss Ann Whitefield and her mother; and Ramsden springs up and hurries to the door to receive them. Whether Ann is good-looking or not depends upon your taste; also and perhaps chiefly on your age and sex. To Octavius she is an enchantingly beautiful woman, in whose presence the world becomes transfigured, and the puny limits of individual consciousness are suddenly made infinite by a mystic memory of the whole life of the race to its beginnings in the east, or even back to the paradise from which it fell. She is to him the reality of romance, the leaner good sense of nonsense, the unveiling of his eyes, the freeing of his soul, the abolition of time, place and circumstance, the etherealization of his blood into rapturous rivers of the very water of life itself, the revelation of all the mysteries and the sanctification of all the dogmas. To her mother she is, to put it as moderately as possible, nothing whatever of the kind. Not that Octavius’s admiration is in any way ridiculous or discreditable. Ann is a well formed creature, as far as that goes; and she is perfectly ladylike, graceful, and comely, with ensnaring eyes and hair. Besides, instead of making herself an eyesore, like her mother, she has devised a mourning costume of black and violet silk which does honor to her late father and reveals the family tradition of brave unconventionality by which Ramsden sets such store.

But all this is beside the point as an explanation of Ann’s charm. Turn up her nose, give a cast to her eye, replace her black and violet confection by the apron and feathers of a flower girl, strike all the aitches out of her speech, and Ann would still make men dream. Vitality is as common as humanity; but, like humanity, it sometimes rises to genius; and Ann is one of the vital geniuses. Not at all, if you please, an oversexed person: that is a vital defect, not a true excess. She is a perfectly respectable, perfectly self-controlled woman, and looks it; though her pose is fashionably frank and impulsive. She inspires confidence as a person who will do nothing she does not mean to do; also some fear, perhaps, as a woman who will probably do everything she means to do without taking more account of other people than may be necessary and what she calls right. In short, what the weaker of her own sex sometimes call a cat.

Nothing can be more decorous than her entry and her reception by Ramsden, whom she kisses. The late Mr Whitefield would be gratified almost to impatience by the long faces of the men (except Tanner, who is fidgety), the silent hand grasps, the sympathetic placing of chairs, the sniffing of the widow, and the liquid eye of the daughter, whose heart, apparently, will not let her control her tongue to speech. Ramsden and Octavius take the two chairs from the wall, and place them for the two ladies; but Ann comes to Tanner and takes his chair, which he offers with a brusque gesture, subsequently relieving his irritation by sitting down on the corner of the writing table with studied indecorum. Octavius gives Mrs Whitefield a chair next Ann, and himself takes the vacant one which Ramsden has placed under the nose of the effigy of Mr Herbert Spencer.

Mrs Whitefield, by the way, is a little woman, whose faded flaxen hair looks like straw on an egg. She has an expression of muddled shrewdness, a squeak of protest in her voice, and an odd air of continually elbowing away some larger person who is crushing her into a corner. One guesses her as one of those women who are conscious of being treated as silly and negligible, and who, without having strength enough to assert themselves effectually, at any rate never submit to their fate. There is a touch of chivalry in Octavius’s scrupulous attention to her, even whilst his whole soul is absorbed by Ann.

Ramsden goes solemnly back to his magisterial seat at the writing table, ignoring Tanner, and opens the proceedings.

RAMSDEN : I am sorry, Annie, to force business on you at a sad time like the present. But your poor dear father’s will has raised a very serious question. You have read it, I believe?

[Ann assents with a nod and a catch of her breath, too much affected to speak].

I must say I am surprised to find Mr Tanner named as joint guardian and trustee with myself of you and Rhoda. [A pause. They all look portentous; but they have nothing to say. Ramsden, a little ruffled by the lack of any response, continues] I don’t know that I can consent to act under such conditions. Mr Tanner has, I understand, some objection also; but I do not profess to understand its nature: he will no doubt speak for himself. But we are agreed that we can decide nothing until we know your views. I am afraid I shall have to ask you to choose between my sole guardianship and that of Mr Tanner; for I fear it is impossible for us to undertake a joint arrangement.

ANN : [in a low musical voice] Mamma—

MRS WHITEFIELD : [hastily] Now, Ann, I do beg you not to put it on me. I have no opinion on the subject; and if I had, it would probably not be attended to. I am quite with whatever you three think best.

Tanner turns his head and looks fixedly at Ramsden, who angrily refuses to receive this mute communication.

ANN : [resuming in the same gentle voice, ignoring her mother’s bad taste] Mamma knows that she is not strong enough to bear the whole responsibility for me and Rhoda without some help and advice. Rhoda must have a guardian; and though I am older, I do not think any young unmarried woman should be left quite to her own guidance. I hope you agree with me, Granny?

TANNER : [starting] Granny! Do you intend to call your guardians Granny?

ANN : Don’t be foolish, Jack. Mr Ramsden has always been Grandpapa Roebuck to me: I am Granny’s Annie; and he is Annie’s Granny. I christened him so when I first learned to speak.

RAMSDEN : [sarcastically] I hope you are satisfied, Mr Tanner. Go on, Annie: I quite agree with you.

ANN : Well, if I am to have a guardian, CAN I set aside anybody whom my dear father appointed for me?

RAMSDEN : [biting his lip] You approve of your father’s choice, then?

ANN : It is not for me to approve or disapprove. I accept it. My father loved me and knew best what was good for me.

RAMSDEN : Of course I understand your feeling, Annie. It is what I should have expected of you; and it does you credit. But it does not settle the question so completely as you think. Let me put a case to you. Suppose you were to discover that I had been guilty of some disgraceful action—that I was not the man your poor dear father took me for. Would you still consider it right that I should be Rhoda’s guardian?

ANN : I can’t imagine you doing anything disgraceful, Granny.

TANNER : [to Ramsden] You haven’t done anything of the sort, have you?

RAMSDEN : [indignantly] No sir.

MRS. WHITEFIELD : [placidly] Well, then, why suppose it?

ANN : You see, Granny, Mamma would not like me to suppose it.

RAMSDEN : [much perplexed] You are both so full of natural and affectionate feeling in these family matters that it is very hard to put the situation fairly before you.

TANNER : Besides, my friend, you are not putting the situation fairly before them.

RAMSDEN : [sulkily] Put it yourself, then.

TANNER : I will. Ann: Ramsden thinks I am not fit be your guardian; and I quite agree with him. He considers that if your father had read my book, he wouldn’t have appointed me. That book is the disgraceful action he has been talking about. He thinks it’s your duty for Rhoda’s sake to ask him to act alone and to make me withdraw. Say the word and I will.