nes.

GERALD. Wait till Job Arthur has risen like Anti-christ, and proclaimed
the resurrection of the gods.--Do you see Job Arthur proclaiming
Dionysos and Aphrodite?

ANABEL. It bores me. I don't like your mood. Good night.

GERALD. Oh, don't go.

ANABEL. Yes, good night. (Exit.)

OLIVER. She's NOT reformed, Gerald. She's the same old moral
character--moral to the last bit of her, really--as she always was.

GERALD. Is that what it is?--But one must be moral.

OLIVER. Oh, yes. Oliver Cromwell wasn't as moral as Anabel is--nor such
an iconoclast.

GERALD. Poor old Anabel!

OLIVER. How she hates the dark gods!

GERALD. And yet they cast a spell over her. Poor old Anabel! Well,
Oliver, is Bacchus the father of whisky?

OLIVER. I don't know.--I don't like you either. You seem to smile all
over yourself. It's objectionable. Good night.

GERALD. Oh, look here, this is censorious.

OLIVER. You smile to yourself. (Exit.)

(Curtain.)

ACT III

SCENE I

An old park. Early evening. In the background a low Georgian
hall, which has been turned into offices for the Company, shows
windows already lighted. GERALD and ANABEL walk along the path.

ANABEL. How beautiful this old park is!

GERALD. Yes, it is beautiful--seems so far away from everywhere, if one
doesn't remember that the hall is turned into offices.--No one has lived
here since I was a little boy. I remember going to a Christmas party at
the Walsalls'.

ANABEL. Has it been shut up so long?

GERALD. The Walsalls didn't like it--too near the ugliness. They were
county, you know--we never were: father never gave mother a chance,
there. And besides, the place is damp, cellars full of water.

ANABEL. Even now?

GERALD. No, not now--they've been drained. But the place would be too
damp for a dwelling-house. It's all right as offices. They burn enormous
fires. The rooms are quite charming. This is what happens to the stately
homes of England--they buzz with inky clerks, or their equivalent.
Stateliness is on its last legs.

ANABEL. Yes, it grieves me--though I should be bored if I had to
be stately, I think.--Isn't it beautiful in this light, like an
eighteenth-century aquatint? I'm sure no age was as ugly as this, since
the world began.

GERALD. For pure ugliness, certainly not. And I believe none has been
so filthy to live in.--Let us sit down a minute, shall we? and watch the
rooks fly home. It always stirs sad, sentimenta