OVERRULED

BERNARD SHAW

1912

PREFACE TO OVERRULED.

THE ALLEVIATIONS OF MONOGAMY.

This piece is not an argument for or against polygamy. It is a 
clinical study of how the thing actually occurs among quite 
ordinary people, innocent of all unconventional views concerning 
it. The enormous majority of cases in real life are those of 
people in that position. Those who deliberately and 
conscientiously profess what are oddly called advanced views by 
those others who believe them to be retrograde, are often, and 
indeed mostly, the last people in the world to engage in 
unconventional adventures of any kind, not only because they have 
neither time nor disposition for them, but because the friction 
set up between the individual and the community by the expression 
of unusual views of any sort is quite enough hindrance to the 
heretic without being complicated by personal scandals. Thus the 
theoretic libertine is usually a person of blameless family life, 
whilst the practical libertine is mercilessly severe on all other 
libertines, and excessively conventional in professions of social 
principle.

What is more, these professions are not hypocritical: they are 
for the most part quite sincere. The common libertine, like the 
drunkard, succumbs to a temptation which he does not defend, and 
against which he warns others with an earnestness proportionate 
to the intensity of his own remorse. He (or she) may be a liar 
and a humbug, pretending to be better than the detected 
libertines, and clamoring for their condign punishment; but this 
is mere self-defence. No reasonable person expects the burglar to 
confess his pursuits, or to refrain from joining in the cry of 
Stop Thief when the police get on the track of another burglar. 
If society chooses to penalize candor, it has itself to thank if 
its attack is countered by falsehood. The clamorous virtue of the 
libertine is therefore no more hypocritical than the plea of Not 
Guilty which is allowed to every criminal. But one result is that 
the theorists who write most sincerely and favorably about 
polygamy know least about it; and the practitioners who know most 
about it keep their knowledge very jealously to themselves. Which 
is hardly fair to the practice.


INACCESSIBILITY OF THE FACTS.

Also it is impossible to estimate its prevalence. A practice to 
which nobody confesses may be both universal and unsuspected, 
just as a virtue which everybody is expected, under heavy 
penalties, to claim, may have no existence. It is often assumed--
indeed it is the official assumption of the Churches and the 
divorce courts that a gentleman and a lady cannot be alone 
together innocently. And that is manifest blazing nonsense, 
though many women have been stoned to death in the east, and 
divorced in the west, on the strength of it. On the other hand, 
the innocent and conventional people who regard the gallant 
adventures as crimes of so horrible a nature that only the most 
depraved and desperate characters engage in them or would listen 
to advances in that direction without raising an alarm with the 
noisiest indignation, are clearly examples of the fact that most 
sections of society do not know how the other sections live.
Industry is the most effective check on gallantry. Women may, as 
Napoleon said, be the occupation of the idle man just as men are 
the preoccupation of the idle woman; but the mass of mankind is 
too busy and too poor for the long and expensive sieges which the 
professed libertine lays to virtue. Still, wherever there is 
idleness or even a reasonable supply of elegant leisure there is 
a good deal of coquetry and philandering. It is so much 
pleasanter to dance on the edge of a precipice than to go over it 
that leisured society is full of people who spend a great part of 
their lives in flirtation, and conceal nothing but the 
humiliating secret that they have never gone any further. For 
there is no pleasing people in the matter of reputation in this 
department: every insult is a flattery; every testimonial is a 
disparagement: Joseph is despised and promoted, Potiphar's wife 
admired and condemned: in short, you are never on solid ground 
until you get away from the subject altogether. There is a 
continual and irreconcilable conflict between the natural and 
conventional sides of the case, between spontaneous human 
relations between independent men and women on the one hand and 
the property relation between husband and wife on the other, not 
to mention the confusion under the common name of love of a 
generous natural attraction and interest with the murderous 
jealousy that fastens on and clings to its mate (especially a 
hated mate) as a tiger fastens on a carcase. And the confusion is 
natural; for these extremes are extremes of the same passion; and 
most cases lie somewhere on the scale between them, and are so 
complicated by ordinary likes and dislikes, by incidental wounds 
to vanity or gratifications of it, and by class feeling, that A 
will be jealous of B and not of C, and will tolerate infidelities 
on the part of D whilst being furiously angry when they are 
committed by E.


THE CONVENTION OF JEALOUSY

That jealousy is independent of sex is shown by its intensity in 
children, and by the fact that very jealous people are jealous of 
everybody without regard to relationship or sex, and cannot bear 
to hear the person they "love" speak favorably of anyone under 
any circumstances (many women, for instance, are much more 
jealous of their husbands' mothers and sisters than of unrelated 
women whom they suspect him of fancying); but it is seldom 
possible to disentangle the two passions in practice. Besides, 
jealousy is an inculcated passion, forced by society on people in 
whom it would not occur spontaneously. In Brieux's Bourgeois aux 
Champs, the benevolent hero finds himself detested by the 
neighboring peasants and farmers, not because he preserves game, 
and sets mantraps for poachers, and defends his legal rights over 
his land to the extremest point of unsocial savagery, but 
because, being an amiable and public-spirited person, he refuses 
to do all this, and thereby offends and disparages the sense of 
property in his neighbors. The same thing is true of matrimonial 
jealousy; the man who does not at least pretend to feel it and 
behave as badly as if he really felt it is despised and insulted; 
and many a man has shot or stabbed a friend or been shot or 
stabbed by him in a duel, or disgraced himself and ruined his own 
wife in a divorce scandal, against his conscience, against his 
instinct, and to the destruction of his home, solely because 
Society conspired to drive him to keep its own lower morality in 
countenance in this miserable and undignified manner.

Morality is confused in such matters. In an elegant plutocracy, a 
jealous husband is regarded as a boor. Among the tradesmen who 
supply that plutocracy with its meals, a husband who is not 
jealous, and refrains from assailing his rival with his fists, is 
regarded as a ridiculous, contemptible and cowardly cuckold. And 
the laboring class is divided into the respectable section which 
takes the tradesman's view, and the disreputable section which 
enjoys the license of the plutocracy without its money: creeping 
below the law as its exemplars prance above it; cutting down all 
expenses of respectability and even decency; and frankly 
accepting squalor and disrepute as the price of anarchic self-
indulgence. The conflict between Malvolio and Sir Toby, between 
the marquis and the bourgeois, the cavalier and the puritan, the 
ascetic and the voluptuary, goes on continually, and goes on not 
only between class and class and individual and individual, but 
in the selfsame breast in a series of reactions and revulsions in 
which the irresistible becomes the unbearable, and the unbearable 
the irresistible, until none of us can say what our characters 
really are in this respect.


THE MISSING DATA OF A SCIENTIFIC NATURAL HISTORY OF MARRIAGE.

Of one thing I am persuaded: we shall never attain to a 
reasonable healthy public opinion on sex questions until we 
offer, as the data for that opinion, our actual conduct and our 
real thoughts instead of a moral fiction which we agree to call 
virtuous conduct, and which we then--and here comes in the 
mischief--pretend is our conduct and our thoughts. If the result 
were that we all believed one another to be better than we really 
are, there would be something to be said for it; but the actual 
result appears to be a monstrous exaggeration of the power and 
continuity of sexual passion. The whole world shares the fate of 
Lucrezia Borgia, who, though she seems on investigation to have 
been quite a suitable wife for a modern British Bishop, has been 
invested by the popular historical imagination with all the 
extravagances of a Messalina or a Cenci. Writers of belles 
lettres who are rash enough to admit that their whole life is not 
one constant preoccupation with adored members of the opposite 
sex, and who even countenance La Rochefoucauld's remark that very 
few people would ever imagine themselves in love if they had 
never read anything about it, are gravely declared to be abnormal 
or physically defective by critics of crushing unadventurousness 
and domestication. French authors of saintly temperament are 
forced to include in their retinue countesses of ardent 
complexion with whom they are supposed to live in sin. 
Sentimental controversies on the subject are endless; but they 
are useless, because nobody tells the truth. Rousseau did it by 
an extraordinary effort, aided by a superhuman faculty for human 
natural history, but the result was curiously disconcerting 
because, though the facts were so conventionally shocking that 
people felt that they ought to matter a great deal, they actually 
mattered very little. And even at that everybody pretends not to 
believe him.


ARTIFICIAL RETRIBUTION.

The worst of that is that busybodies with perhaps rather more 
than a normal taste for mischief are continually trying to make 
negligible things matter as much in fact as they do in convention 
by deliberately inflicting injuries--sometimes atrocious 
injuries--on the parties concerned. Few people have any knowledge 
of the savage punishments that are legally inflicted for 
aberrations and absurdities to which no sanely instructed 
community would call any attention. We create an artificial 
morality, and consequently an artificial conscience, by 
manufacturing disastrous consequences for events which, left to 
themselves, would do very little harm (sometimes not any) and be 
forgotten in a few days.

But the artificial morality is not therefore to be condemned 
offhand. In many cases it may save mischief instead of making it: 
for example, though the hanging of a murderer is the duplication 
of a murder, yet it may be less murderous than leaving the matter 
to be settled by blood feud or vendetta. As long as human nature 
insists on revenge, the official organization and satisfaction of 
revenge by the State may be also its minimization. The mischief 
begins when the official revenge persists after the passion it 
satisfies has died out of the race. Stoning a woman to death in 
the east because she has ventured to marry again after being 
deserted by her husband may be more merciful than allowing her to 
be mobbed to death; but the official stoning or burning of an 
adulteress in the west would be an atrocity because few of us 
hate an adulteress to the extent of desiring such a penalty, or 
of being prepared to take the law into our own hands if it were 
withheld. Now what applies to this extreme case applies also in 
due degree to the other cases. Offences in which sex is concerned 
are often needlessly magnified by penalties, ranging from various 
forms of social ostracism to long sentences of penal servitude, 
which would be seen to be monstrously disproportionate to the 
real feeling against them if the removal of both the penalties 
and the taboo on their discussion made it possible for us to 
ascertain their real prevalence and estimation. Fortunately there 
is one outlet for the truth. We are permitted to discuss in jest 
what we may not discuss in earnest. A serious comedy about sex is 
taboo: a farcical comedy is privileged.


THE FAVORITE SUBJECT OF FARCICAL COMEDY.

The little piece which follows this preface accordingly takes the 
form of a farcical comedy, because it is a contribution to the 
very extensive dramatic literature which takes as its special 
department the gallantries of married people. The stage has been 
preoccupied by such affairs for centuries, not only in the 
jesting vein of Restoration Comedy and Palais Royal farce, but in 
the more tragically turned adulteries of the Parisian school 
which dominated the stage until Ibsen put them out of countenance 
and relegated them to their proper place as articles of commerce. 
Their continued vogue in that department maintains the tradition 
that adultery is the dramatic subject par excellence, and indeed 
that a play that is not about adultery is not a play at all. I 
was considered a heresiarch of the most extravagant kind when I 
expressed my opinion at the outset of my career as a playwright, 
that adultery is the dullest of themes on the stage, and that 
from Francesca and Paolo down to the latest guilty couple of the 
school of Dumas fils, the romantic adulterers have all been 
intolerable bores.


THE PSEUDO SEX PLAY.

Later on, I had occasion to point out to the defenders of sex as 
the proper theme of drama, that though they were right in ranking 
sex as an intensely interesting subject, they were wrong in 
assuming that sex is an indispensable motive in popular plays. 
The plays of Moliere are, like the novels of the Victorian epoch 
or Don Quixote, as nearly sexless as anything not absolutely 
inhuman can be; and some of Shakespear's plays are sexually on a 
par with the census: they contain women as well as men, and that 
is all. This had to be admitted; but it was still assumed that 
the plays of the XIX century Parisian school are, in contrast 
with the sexless masterpieces, saturated with sex; and this I 
strenuously denied. A play about the convention that a man should 
fight a duel or come to fisticuffs with his wife's lover if she 
has one, or the convention that he should strangle her like 
Othello, or turn her out of the house and never see her or allow 
her to see her children again, or the convention that she should 
never be spoken to again by any decent person and should finally 
drown herself, or the convention that persons involved in scenes 
of recrimination or confession by these conventions should call 
each other certain abusive names and describe their conduct as 
guilty and frail and so on: all these may provide material for 
very effective plays; but such plays are not dramatic studies of 
sex: one might as well say that Romeo and Juliet is a dramatic 
study of pharmacy because the catastrophe is brought about 
through an apothecary. Duels are not sex; divorce cases are not 
sex; the Trade Unionism of married women is not sex. Only the 
most insignificant fraction of the gallantries of married people 
produce any of the conventional results; and plays occupied 
wholly with the conventional results are therefore utterly 
unsatisfying as sex plays, however interesting they may be as 
plays of intrigue and plot puzzles.

The world is finding this out rapidly. The Sunday papers, which 
in the days when they appealed almost exclusively to the lower 
middle class were crammed with police intelligence, and more 
especially with divorce and murder cases, now lay no stress on 
them; and police papers which confined themselves entirely to 
such matters, and were once eagerly read, have perished through 
the essential dulness of their topics. And yet the interest in 
sex is stronger than ever: in fact, the literature that has 
driven out the journalism of the divorce courts is a literature 
occupied with sex to an extent and with an intimacy and frankness 
that would have seemed utterly impossible to Thackeray or Dickens 
if they had been told that the change would complete itself 
within fifty years of their own time.


ART AND MORALITY. 

It is ridiculous to say, as inconsiderate amateurs of the arts 
do, that art has nothing to do with morality. What is true is 
that the artist's business is not that of the policeman; and that 
such factitious consequences and put-up jobs as divorces and 
executions and the detective operations that lead up to them are 
no essential part of life, though, like poisons and buttered 
slides and red-hot pokers, they provide material for plenty of 
thrilling or amusing stories suited to people who are incapable 
of any interest in psychology. But the fine artists must keep the 
policeman out of his studies of sex and studies of crime. It is 
by clinging nervously to the policeman that most of the pseudo 
sex plays convince me that the writers have either never had any 
serious personal experience of their ostensible subject, or else 
have never conceived it possible that the stage door present the 
phenomena of sex as they appear in nature.


THE LIMITS OF STAGE PRESENTATION.

But the stage presents much more shocking phenomena than those of 
sex. There is, of course, a sense in which you cannot present sex 
on the stage, just as you cannot present murder. Macbeth must no 
more really kill Duncan than he must himself be really slain by 
Macduff. But the feelings of a murderer can be expressed in a 
certain artistic convention; and a carefully prearranged sword 
exercise can be gone through with sufficient pretence of 
earnestness to be accepted by the willing imaginations of the 
younger spectators as a desperate combat.

The tragedy of love has been presented on the stage in the same 
way. In Tristan and Isolde, the curtain does not, as in Romeo and 
Juliet, rise with the lark: the whole night of love is played 
before the spectators. The lovers do not discuss marriage in an 
elegantly sentimental way: they utter the visions and feelings 
that come to lovers at the supreme moments of their love, totally 
forgetting that there are such things in the world as husbands 
and lawyers and duelling codes and theories of sin and notions of 
propriety and all the other irrelevancies which provide
hackneyed and bloodless material for our so-called plays of 
passion.


PRUDERIES OF THE FRENCH STAGE.

To all stage presentations there are limits. If Macduff were to 
stab Macbeth, the spectacle would be intolerable; and even the 
pretence which we allow on our stage is ridiculously destructive 
to the illusion of the scene. Yet pugilists and gladiators will 
actually fight and kill in public without sham, even as a 
spectacle for money. But no sober couple of lovers of any 
delicacy could endure to be watched. We in England, accustomed to 
consider the French stage much more licentious than the British, 
are always surprised and puzzled when we learn, as we may do any 
day if we come within reach of such information, that French 
actors are often scandalized by what they consider the indecency 
of the English stage, and that French actresses who desire a 
greater license in appealing to the sexual instincts than the 
French stage allows them, learn and establish themselves on the 
English stage. The German and Russian stages are in the same 
relation to the French and perhaps more or less all the Latin 
stages. The reason is that, partly from a want of respect for the 
theatre, partly from a sort of respect for art in general which 
moves them to accord moral privileges to artists, partly from the 
very objectionable tradition that the realm of art is Alsatia and 
the contemplation of works of art a holiday from the burden of 
virtue, partly because French prudery does not attach itself to 
the same points of behavior as British prudery, and has a 
different code of the mentionable and the unmentionable, and
for many other reasons the French tolerate plays which are never 
performed in England until they have been spoiled by a process of 
bowdlerization; yet French taste is more fastidious than ours as 
to the exhibition and treatment on the stage of the physical 
incidents of sex. On the French stage a kiss is as obvious a 
convention as the thrust under the arm by which Macduff runs 
Macbeth through. It is even a purposely unconvincing convention: 
the actors rather insisting that it shall be impossible for any 
spectator to mistake a stage kiss for a real one. In England, on 
the contrary, realism is carried to the point at which nobody 
except the two performers can perceive that the caress is not 
genuine. And here the English stage is certainly in the right; 
for whatever question there arises as to what incidents are 
proper for representation on the stage or not, my experience as a 
playgoer leaves me in no doubt that once it is decided to 
represent an incident, it will be offensive, no matter whether it 
be a prayer or a kiss, unless it is presented with a convincing 
appearance of sincerity.


OUR DISILLUSIVE SCENERY.

For example, the main objection to the use of illusive scenery 
(in most modern plays scenery is not illusive; everything visible 
is as real as in your drawing room at home) is that it is 
unconvincing; whilst the imaginary scenery with which the 
audience provides a platform or tribune like the Elizabethan 
stage or the Greek stage used by Sophocles, is quite convincing. 
In fact, the more scenery you have the less illusion you produce. 
The wise playwright, when he cannot get absolute reality of 
presentation, goes to the other extreme, and aims at atmosphere 
and suggestion of mood rather than at direct simulative illusion. 
The theatre, as I first knew it, was a place of wings and flats 
which destroyed both atmosphere and illusion. This was tolerated, 
and even intensely enjoyed, but not in the least because nothing 
better was possible; for all the devices employed in the 
productions of Mr. Granville Barker or Max Reinhardt or the 
Moscow Art Theatre were equally available for Colley Cibber and 
Garrick, except the intensity of our artificial light. When 
Garrick played Richard II in slashed trunk hose and plumes, it 
was not because he believed that the Plantagenets dressed like 
that, or because the costumes could not have made him a XV 
century dress as easily as a nondescript combination of the state 
robes of George III with such scraps of older fashions as seemed 
to playgoers for some reason to be romantic. The charm of the 
theatre in those days was its makebelieve. It has that charm 
still, not only for the amateurs, who are happiest when they are 
most unnatural and impossible and absurd, but for audiences as 
well. I have seen performances of my own plays which were to me 
far wilder burlesques than Sheridan's Critic or Buckingham's 
Rehearsal; yet they have produced sincere laughter and tears such 
as the most finished metropolitan productions have failed to 
elicit. Fielding was entirely right when he represented Partridge 
as enjoying intensely the performance of the king in Hamlet 
because anybody could see that the king was an actor, and 
resenting Garrick's Hamlet because it might have been a real man. 
Yet we have only to look at the portraits of Garrick to see that 
his performances would nowadays seem almost as extravagantly 
stagey as his costumes. In our day Calve's intensely real Carmen 
never pleased the mob as much as the obvious fancy ball 
masquerading of suburban young ladies in the same character.


HOLDING THE MIRROR UP TO NATURE.

Theatrical art begins as the holding up to Nature of a distorting 
mirror. In this phase it pleases people who are childish enough 
to believe that they can see what they look like and what they 
are when they look at a true mirror. Naturally they think that a 
true mirror can teach them nothing. Only by giving them back some 
monstrous image can the mirror amuse them or terrify them. It is 
not until they grow up to the point at which they learn that they 
know very little about themselves, and that they do not see 
themselves in a true mirror as other people see them, that they 
become consumed with curiosity as to what they really are like, 
and begin to demand that the stage shall be a mirror of such 
accuracy and intensity of illumination that they shall be able to 
get glimpses of their real selves in it, and also learn a little 
how they appear to other people.

For audiences of this highly developed class, sex can no longer 
be ignored or conventionalized or distorted by the playwright who 
makes the mirror. The old sentimental extravagances and the old 
grossnesses are of no further use to him. Don Giovanni and 
Zerlina are not gross: Tristan and Isolde are not extravagant or 
sentimental. They say and do nothing that you cannot bear to hear 
and see; and yet they give you, the one pair briefly and 
slightly, and the other fully and deeply, what passes in the 
minds of lovers. The love depicted may be that of a philosophic 
adventurer tempting an ignorant country girl, or of a tragically 
serious poet entangled with a woman of noble capacity in a 
passion which has become for them the reality of the whole 
universe. No matter: the thing is dramatized and dramatized 
directly, not talked about as something that happened before the 
curtain rose, or that will happen after it falls.


FARCICAL COMEDY SHIRKING ITS SUBJECT.

Now if all this can be done in the key of tragedy and philosophic 
comedy, it can, I have always contended, be done in the key of 
farcical comedy; and Overruled is a trifling experiment in that 
manner. Conventional farcical comedies are always finally tedious 
because the heart of them, the inevitable conjugal infidelity, is 
always evaded. Even its consequences are evaded. Mr. Granville 
Barker has pointed out rightly that if the third acts of our 
farcical comedies dared to describe the consequences that would 
follow from the first and second in real life, they would end as 
squalid tragedies; and in my opinion they would be greatly 
improved thereby even as entertainments; for I have never seen a 
three-act farcical comedy without being bored and tired by the 
third act, and observing that the rest of the audience were in 
the same condition, though they were not vigilantly introspective 
enough to find that out, and were apt to blame one another, 
especially the husbands and wives, for their crossness. But it is 
happily by no means true that conjugal infidelities always 
produce tragic consequences, or that they need produce even the 
unhappiness which they often do produce. Besides, the more 
momentous the consequences, the more interesting become the 
impulses and imaginations and reasonings, if any, of the people 
who disregard them. If I had an opportunity of conversing with 
the ghost of an executed murderer, I have no doubt he would begin 
to tell me eagerly about his trial, with the names of the 
distinguished ladies and gentlemen who honored him with their 
presence on that occasion, and then about his execution. All of 
which would bore me exceedingly. I should say, "My dear sir: such 
manufactured ceremonies do not interest me in the least. I know 
how a man is tried, and how he is hanged. I should have had you 
killed in a much less disgusting, hypocritical, and unfriendly 
manner if the matter had been in my hands. What I want to know 
about is the murder. How did you feel when you committed it? Why 
did you do it? What did you say to yourself about it? If, like 
most murderers, you had not been hanged, would you have committed 
other murders? Did you really dislike the victim, or did you want 
his money, or did you murder a person whom you did not dislike, 
and from whose death you had nothing to gain, merely for the sake 
of murdering? If so, can you describe the charm to me? Does it 
come upon you periodically; or is it chronic? Has curiosity 
anything to do with it?" I would ply him with all manner of 
questions to find out what murder is really like; and I should 
not be satisfied until I had realized that I, too, might commit a 
murder, or else that there is some specific quality present in a 
murderer and lacking in me. And, if so, what that quality is.

In just the same way, I want the unfaithful husband or the 
unfaithful wife in a farcical comedy not to bother me with their 
divorce cases or the stratagems they employ to avoid a divorce 
case, but to tell me how and why married couples are unfaithful. 
I don't want to hear the lies they tell one another to conceal 
what they have done, but the truths they tell one another when 
they have to face what they have done without concealment or 
excuse. No doubt prudent and considerate people conceal such 
adventures, when they can, from those who are most likely to be 
wounded by them; but it is not to be presumed that, when found 
out, they necessarily disgrace themselves by irritating lies and 
transparent subterfuges.

My playlet, which I offer as a model to all future writers of 
farcical comedy, may now, I hope, be read without shock. I may 
just add that Mr. Sibthorpe Juno's view that morality demands, 
not that we should behave morally (an impossibility to our sinful 
nature) but that we shall not attempt to defend our immoralities, 
is a standard view in England, and was advanced in all seriousness
by an earnest and distinguished British moralist shortly after
the first performance of Overruled. My objection to that aspect
of the doctrine of original sin is that no necessary and 
inevitable operation of human nature can reasonably be regarded 
as sinful at all, and that a morality which assumes the contrary 
is an absurd morality, and can be kept in countenance only by 
hypocrisy. When people were ashamed of sanitary problems, and 
refused to face them, leaving them to solve themselves 
clandestinely in dirt and secrecy, the solution arrived at was 
the Black Death. A similar policy as to sex problems has solved 
itself by an even worse plague than the Black Death; and the 
remedy for that is not Salvarsan, but sound moral hygiene, the 
first foundation of which is the discontinuance of our habit of 
telling not only the comparatively harmless lies that we know we 
ought not to tell, but the ruinous lies that we foolishly think 
we ought to tell.



OVERRULED.

A lady and gentleman are sitting together on a chesterfield in a 
retired corner of the lounge of a seaside hotel. It is a summer 
night: the French window behind them stands open. The terrace 
without overlooks a moonlit harbor. The lounge is dark. The 
chesterfield, upholstered in silver grey, and the two figures on 
it in evening dress, catch the light from an arc lamp somewhere; 
but the walls, covered with a dark green paper, are in gloom. 
There are two stray chairs, one on each side. On the gentleman's 
right, behind him up near the window, is an unused fireplace. 
Opposite it on the lady's left is a door. The gentleman is on the 
lady's right.

The lady is very attractive, with a musical voice and soft 
appealing manners. She is young: that is, one feels sure that she 
is under thirty-five and over twenty-four. The gentleman does not 
look much older. He is rather handsome, and has ventured as far 
in the direction of poetic dandyism in the arrangement of his 
hair as any man who is not a professional artist can afford to in 
England. He is obviously very much in love with the lady, and is, 
in fact, yielding to an irresistible impulse to throw his arms 
around her.


THE LADY. Don't--oh don't be horrid. Please, Mr. Lunn [she rises 
from the lounge and retreats behind it]! Promise me you won't be 
horrid.

GREGORY LUNN. I'm not being horrid, Mrs. Juno. I'm not going to 
be horrid. I love you: that's all. I'm extraordinarily happy.

MRS. JUNO. You will really be good?

GREGORY. I'll be whatever you wish me to be. I tell you I love 
you. I love loving you. I don't want to be tired and sorry, as I 
should be if I were to be horrid. I don't want you to be tired 
and sorry. Do come and sit down again.

MRS. JUNO [coming back to her seat]. You're sure you don't want 
anything you oughtn't to?

GREGORY. Quite sure. I only want you [she recoils]. Don't be 
alarmed. I like wanting you. As long as I have a want, I have a 
reason for living. Satisfaction is death.

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

GREGORY. Not with you. 

MRS. JUNO. What!

GREGORY. Oh, it sounds uncomplimentary; but it isn't really. Do 
you know why half the couples who find themselves situated as we 
are now behave horridly?

MRS. JUNO. Because they can't help it if they let things go too 
far.

GREGORY. Not a bit of it. It's because they have nothing else to 
do, and no other way of entertaining each other. You don't know 
what it is to be alone with a woman who has little beauty and 
less conversation. What is a man to do? She can't talk 
interestingly; and if he talks that way himself she doesn't 
understand him. He can't look at her: if he does, he only finds 
out that she isn't beautiful. Before the end of five minutes they 
are both hideously bored. There's only one thing that can save 
the situation; and that's what you call being horrid. With a 
beautiful, witty, kind woman, there's no time for such follies. 
It's so delightful to look at her, to listen to her voice, to 
hear all she has to say, that nothing else happens. That is why 
the woman who is supposed to have a thousand lovers seldom has 
one; whilst the stupid, graceless animals of women have dozens.

MRS. JUNO. I wonder! It's quite true that when one feels in 
danger one talks like mad to stave it off, even when one doesn't 
quite want to stave it off.

GREGORY. One never does quite want to stave it off. Danger is 
delicious. But death isn't. We court the danger; but the real 
delight is in escaping, after all.

MRS. JUNO. I don't think we'll talk about it any more. Danger is 
all very well when you do escape; but sometimes one doesn't. I 
tell you frankly I don't feel as safe as you do--if you really 
do.

GREGORY. But surely you can do as you please without injuring 
anyone, Mrs. Juno. That is the whole secret of your extraordinary 
charm for me.

MRS. JUNO. I don't understand.

GREGORY. Well, I hardly know how to begin to explain. But the 
root of the matter is that I am what people call a good man.

MRS. JUNO. I thought so until you began making love to me.

GREGORY. But you knew I loved you all along. 

MRS. JUNO. Yes, of course; but I depended on you not to tell me 
so; because I thought you were good. Your blurting it out spoilt 
it. And it was wicked besides. 

GREGORY. Not at all. You see, it's a great many years since I've 
been able to allow myself to fall in love. I know lots of 
charming women; but the worst of it is, they're all married. 
Women don't become charming, to my taste, until they're fully 
developed; and by that time, if they're really nice, they're 
snapped up and married. And then, because I am a good man, I have 
to place a limit to my regard for them. I may be fortunate enough 
to gain friendship and even very warm affection from them; but my 
loyalty to their husbands and their hearths and their happiness 
obliges me to draw a line and not overstep it. Of course I value 
such affectionate regard very highly indeed. I am surrounded with 
women who are most dear to me. But every one of them has a post 
sticking up, if I may put it that way, with the inscription 
Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted. How we all loathe that notice! In 
every lovely garden, in every dell full of primroses, on every 
fair hillside, we meet that confounded board; and there is always 
a gamekeeper round the corner. But what is that to the horror of 
meeting it on every beautiful woman, and knowing that there is a 
husband round the corner? I have had this accursed board standing 
between me and every dear and desirable woman until I thought I 
had lost the power of letting myself fall really and 
wholeheartedly in love.

MRS. JUNO. Wasn't there a widow?

GREGORY. No. Widows are extraordinarily scarce in modern society. 
Husbands live longer than they used to; and even when they do 
die, their widows have a string of names down for their next.

MRS. JUNO. Well, what about the young girls? 

GREGORY. Oh, who cares for young girls? They're sympathetic. 
They're beginners. They don't attract me. I'm afraid of them.

MRS. JUNO. That's the correct thing to say to a woman of my age. 
But it doesn't explain why you seem to have put your scruples in 
your pocket when you met me.

GREGORY. Surely that's quite clear. I--

MRS. JUNO. No: please don't explain. I don't want to know. I take 
your word for it. Besides, it doesn't matter now. Our voyage is 
over; and to-morrow I start for the north to my poor father's 
place.

GREGORY [surprised]. Your poor father! I thought he was alive.

MRS. JUNO. So he is. What made you think he wasn't?

GREGORY. You said your POOR father. 

MRS. JUNO. Oh, that's a trick of mine. Rather a silly trick, I 
Suppose; but there's something pathetic to me about men: I find 
myself calling them poor So-and-So when there's nothing whatever 
the matter with them. 

GREGORY [who has listened in growing alarm]. But--I--is?--
wa--? Oh, Lord!

MRS. JUNO. What's the matter? 

GREGORY. Nothing.

MRS. JUNO. Nothing! [Rising anxiously]. Nonsense: you're ill.

GREGORY. No. It was something about your late husband--

MRS. JUNO. My LATE husband! What do you mean? [clutching him, 
horror-stricken]. Don't tell me he's dead.

GREGORY [rising, equally appalled]. Don't tell me he's alive.

MRS. JUNO. Oh, don't frighten me like this. Of course he's 
alive--unless you've heard anything. 

GREGORY. The first day we met--on the boat--you spoke to me of 
your poor dear husband.

MRS. JUNO [releasing him, quite reassured]. Is that all?

GREGORY. Well, afterwards you called him poor Tops. Always poor 
Tops, Our poor dear Tops. What could I think?

MRS. JUNO [sitting down again]. I wish you hadn't given me such a 
shock about him; for I haven't been treating him at all well. 
Neither have you.

GREGORY [relapsing into his seat, overwhelmed]. And you mean to 
tell me you're not a widow!

MRS. JUNO. Gracious, no! I'm not in black. 

GREGORY. Then I have been behaving like a blackguard. I have 
broken my promise to my mother. I shall never have an easy 
conscience again.

MRS. JUNO. I'm sorry. I thought you knew.

GREGORY. You thought I was a libertine?

MRS. JUNO. No: of course I shouldn't have spoken to you if I had 
thought that. I thought you liked me, but that you knew, and 
would be good.

GREGORY [stretching his hands towards her breast]. I thought the 
burden of being good had fallen from my soul at last. I saw 
nothing there but a bosom to rest on: the bosom of a lovely woman 
of whom I could dream without guilt. What do I see now?

MRS. JUNO. Just what you saw before. 

GREGORY [despairingly]. No, no.

MRS. JUNO. What else?

GREGORY. Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted: Trespassers Will Be 
Prosecuted.

MRS. JUNO. They won't if they hold their tongues. Don't be such a 
coward. My husband won't eat you. 

GREGORY. I'm not afraid of your husband. I'm afraid of my 
conscience.

MRS. JUNO [losing patience]. Well! I don't consider myself at all 
a badly behaved woman; for nothing has passed between us that was 
not perfectly nice and friendly; but really! to hear a grown-up 
man talking about promises to his mother!

GREGORY [interrupting her]. Yes, Yes: I know all about that. It's 
not romantic: it's not Don Juan: it's not advanced; but we feel 
it all the same. It's far deeper in our blood and bones than all 
the romantic stuff. My father got into a scandal once: that was 
why my mother made me promise never to make love to a married 
woman. And now I've done it I can't feel honest. Don't pretend to 
despise me or laugh at me. You feel it too. You said just now 
that your own conscience was uneasy when you thought of your 
husband. What must it be when you think of my wife?

MRS. JUNO [rising aghast]. Your wife!!! You don't dare sit there 
and tell me coolly that you're a married man!

GREGORY. I never led you to believe I was unmarried.

MRS. JUNO. Oh! You never gave me the faintest hint that you had a 
wife.

GREGORY. I did indeed. I discussed things with you that only 
married people really understand.

MRS. JUNO. Oh!!

GREGORY. I thought it the most delicate way of letting you know.

MRS. JUNO. Well, you ARE a daisy, I must say. I suppose that's 
vulgar; but really! really!! You and your goodness! However, now 
we've found one another out there's only one thing to be done. 
Will you please go? 

GREGORY [rising slowly].  I OUGHT to go.

MRS. JUNO. Well, go.

GREGORY. Yes. Er--[he tries to go]. I--I somehow can't. [He sits 
down again helplessly]. My conscience is active: my will is 
paralyzed. This is really dreadful. Would you mind ringing the 
bell and asking them to throw me out? You ought to, you know.

MRS. JUNO. What! make a scandal in the face of the whole hotel! 
Certainly not. Don't be a fool.

GREGORY. Yes; but I can't go.

MRS. JUNO. Then I can. Goodbye.

GREGORY [clinging to her hand]. Can you really? 

MRS. JUNO. Of course I--[she wavers]. Oh, dear! [They contemplate 
one another helplessly]. I can't. [She sinks on the lounge, hand 
in hand with him]. 

GREGORY. For heaven's sake pull yourself together. It's a 
question of self-control.

MRS. JUNO [dragging her hand away and retreating to the end of 
the chesterfield]. No: it's a question of distance. Self-control 
is all very well two or three yards off, or on a ship, with 
everybody looking on. Don't come any nearer.

GREGORY. This is a ghastly business. I want to go away; and I 
can't.

MRS. JUNO. I think you ought to go [he makes an effort; and she 
adds quickly] but if you try I shall grab you round the neck and 
disgrace myself. I implore you to sit still and be nice.

GREGORY. I implore you to run away. I believe I can trust myself 
to let you go for your own sake. But it will break my heart.

MRS. JUNO. I don't want to break your heart. I can't bear to 
think of your sitting here alone. I can't bear to think of 
sitting alone myself somewhere else. It's so senseless--so 
ridiculous--when we might be so happy. I don't want to be wicked, 
or coarse. But I like you very much; and I do want to be 
affectionate and human.

GREGORY. I ought to draw a line.

MRS. JUNO. So you shall, dear. Tell me: do you really like me? I 
don't mean LOVE me: you might love the housemaid--

GREGORY [vehemently]. No!

MRS. JUNO. Oh, yes you might; and what does that matter, anyhow? 
Are you really fond of me? Are we friends--comrades? Would you be 
sorry if I died? 

GREGORY [shrinking]. Oh, don't.

MRS. JUNO. Or was it the usual aimless man's lark: a mere 
shipboard flirtation?

GREGORY. Oh, no, no: nothing half so bad, so vulgar, so wrong. I 
assure you I only meant to be agreeable. It grew on me before I 
noticed it.

MRS. JUNO. And you were glad to let it grow?

GREGORY. I let it grow because the board was not up.

MRS. JUNO. Bother the board! I am just as fond of Sibthorpe as--

GREGORY. Sibthorpe!

MRS. JUNO. Sibthorpe is my husband's Christian name. I oughtn't 
to call him Tops to you now. 

GREGORY [chuckling]. It sounded like something to drink. But I 
have no right to laugh at him. My Christian name is Gregory, 
which sounds like a powder.

MRS. JUNO [chilled]. That is so like a man! I offer you my 
heart's warmest friendliest feeling; and you think of nothing but 
a silly joke. A quip like that makes you forget me.

GREGORY. Forget you! Oh, if I only could!

MRS. JUNO. If you could, would you?

GREGORY [burying his shamed face in his hands]. No: I'd die 
first. Oh, I hate myself.

MRS. JUNO. I glory in myself. It's so jolly to be reckless. CAN a 
man be reckless, I wonder.

GREGORY [straightening himself desperately]. No. I'm not 
reckless. I know what I'm doing: my conscience is awake. Oh, 
where is the intoxication of love? the delirium? the madness that 
makes a man think the world well lost for the woman he adores? I 
don't think anything of the sort: I see that it's not worth it: I 
know that it's wrong: I have never in my life been cooler, more 
businesslike.

MRS. JUNO. [opening her arms to him] But you can't resist me.

GREGORY. I must. I ought [throwing himself into her arms]. Oh, my 
darling, my treasure, we shall be sorry for this.

MRS. JUNO. We can forgive ourselves. Could we forgive ourselves 
if we let this moment slip?

GREGORY. I protest to the last. I'm against this. I have been 
pushed over a precipice. I'm innocent. This wild joy, this 
exquisite tenderness, this ascent into heaven can thrill me to 
the uttermost fibre of my heart [with a gesture of ecstasy she 
hides her face on his shoulder]; but it can't subdue my mind or 
corrupt my conscience, which still shouts to the skies that I'm 
not a willing party to this outrageous conduct. I repudiate the 
bliss with which you are filling me.

MRS. JUNO. Never mind your conscience. Tell me how happy you are.

GREGORY. No, I recall you to your duty. But oh, I will give you 
my life with both hands if you can tell me that you feel for me 
one millionth part of what I feel for you now.

MRS. JUNO. Oh, yes, yes. Be satisfied with that. Ask for no more. 
Let me go.

GREGORY. I can't. I have no will. Something stronger than either 
of us is in command here. Nothing on earth or in heaven can part 
us now. You know that, don't you? 

MRS. JUNO. Oh, don't make me say it. Of course I know. Nothing--
not life nor death nor shame nor anything can part us.

A MATTER-OF-FACT MALE VOICE IN THE CORRIDOR. All right. This must 
be it.

The two recover with a violent start; release one another; and 
spring back to opposite sides of the lounge. 

GREGORY. That did it.

MRS. JUNO [in a thrilling whisper] Sh--sh--sh! That was my 
husband's voice.

GREGORY. Impossible: it's only our guilty fancy.

A WOMAN'S VOICE. This is the way to the lounge. I know it.

GREGORY. Great Heaven! we're both mad. That's my wife's voice.

MRS. JUNO. Ridiculous! Oh! we're dreaming it all. We [the door 
opens; and Sibthorpe Juno appears in the roseate glow of the 
corridor (which happens to be papered in pink) with Mrs. Lunn, 
like Tannhauser in the hill of Venus. He is a fussily energetic 
little man, who gives himself an air of gallantry by greasing the 
points of his moustaches and dressing very carefully. She is a 
tall, imposing, handsome, languid woman, with flashing dark eyes 
and long lashes. They make for the chesterfield, not noticing the 
two palpitating figures blotted against the walls in the gloom on 
either side. The figures flit away noiselessly through the window 
and disappear].

JUNO [officiously] Ah: here we are. [He leads the way to the 
sofa]. Sit down: I'm sure you're tired. [She sits]. That's right. 
[He sits beside her on her left]. Hullo! [he rises] this sofa's 
quite warm.

MRS. LUNN [bored] Is it? I don't notice it. I expect the sun's 
been on it.

JUNO. I felt it quite distinctly: I'm more thinly clad than you. 
[He sits down again, and proceeds, with a sigh of satisfaction]. 
What a relief to get off the ship and have a private room! That's 
the worst of a ship. You're under observation all the time.

MRS. LUNN. But why not?

JUNO. Well, of course there's no reason: at least I suppose not. 
But, you know, part of the romance of a journey is that a man 
keeps imagining that something might happen; and he can't do that 
if there are a lot of people about and it simply can't happen.

MRS. LUNN. Mr. Juno: romance is all very well on board ship; but 
when your foot touches the soil of England there's an end of it.

JUNO. No: believe me, that's a foreigner's mistake: we are the 
most romantic people in the world, we English. Why, my very 
presence here is a romance.

MRS. LUNN [faintly ironical] Indeed?

JUNO. Yes. You've guessed, of course, that I'm a married man.

MRS. LUNN. Oh, that's all right. I'm a married woman. 

JUNO. Thank Heaven for that! To my English mind, passion is not 
real passion without guilt. I am a red-blooded man, Mrs. Lunn: I 
can't help it. The tragedy of my life is that I married, when 
quite young, a woman whom I couldn't help being very fond of. I 
longed for a guilty passion--for the real thing--the wicked 
thing; and yet I couldn't care twopence for any other woman when 
my wife was about. Year after year went by: I felt my youth 
slipping away without ever having had a romance in my life; for 
marriage is all very well; but it isn't romance. There's nothing 
wrong in it, you see.

MRS. LUNN. Poor man! How you must have suffered! 

JUNO. No: that was what was so tame about it. I wanted to suffer. 
You get so sick of being happily married. It's always the happy 
marriages that break up. At last my wife and I agreed that we 
ought to take a holiday.

MRS. LUNN. Hadn't you holidays every year?

JUNO. Oh, the seaside and so on! That's not what we meant. We 
meant a holiday from one another.

MRS. LUNN. How very odd!

JUNO. She said it was an excellent idea; that domestic felicity 
was making us perfectly idiotic; that she wanted a holiday, too. 
So we agreed to go round the world in opposite directions. I 
started for Suez on the day she sailed for New York.

MRS. LUNN [suddenly becoming attentive] That's precisely what 
Gregory and I did. Now I wonder did he want a holiday from me! 
What he said was that he wanted the delight of meeting me after a 
long absence.

JUNO. Could anything be more romantic than that? Would anyone 
else than an Englishman have thought of it? I daresay my 
temperament seems tame to your boiling southern blood--

MRS. LUNN. My what!