The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Admirable Crichton, by J. M. Barrie

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Title: The Admirable Crichton

Author: J. M. Barrie

Posting Date: February 28, 2009 [EBook #3490]
Release Date: October, 2002

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE ADMIRABLE CRICHTON

From The Plays Of J. M. Barrie

A COMEDY

By J. M. Barrie

ACT I. AT LOAM HOUSE, MAYFAIR

A moment before the curtain rises, the Hon. Ernest Woolley drives up
to the door of Loam House in Mayfair. There is a happy smile on his
pleasant, insignificant face, and this presumably means that he is
thinking of himself. He is too busy over nothing, this man about town,
to be always thinking of himself, but, on the other hand, he almost
never thinks of any other person. Probably Ernest's great moment is when
he wakes of a morning and realises that he really is Ernest, for we must
all wish to be that which is our ideal. We can conceive him springing
out of bed light-heartedly and waiting for his man to do the rest. He
is dressed in excellent taste, with just the little bit more which shows
that he is not without a sense of humour: the dandiacal are often saved
by carrying a smile at the whole thing in their spats, let us say.
Ernest left Cambridge the other day, a member of The Athenaeum (which
he would be sorry to have you confound with a club in London of the same
name). He is a bachelor, but not of arts, no mean epigrammatist (as you
shall see), and a favourite of the ladies. He is almost a celebrity in
restaurants, where he dines frequently, returning to sup; and during
this last year he has probably paid as much in them for the privilege of
handing his hat to an attendant as the rent of a working-man's flat. He
complains brightly that he is hard up, and that if somebody or other at
Westminster does not look out the country will go to the dogs. He is no
fool. He has the shrewdness to float with the current because it is a
labour-saving process, but he has sufficient pluck to fight, if fight
he must (a brief c