ld him to do it.

KEN. You. You did that to me.

LAURA. I wanted to help you.

KEN. It takes a woman to do a thing like that.

LAURA. I loved you.

KEN. It takes love.--That's what love is. [_He goes to door._]
That's what it does to a man. [_Pause. The room is deathly quiet._]
And when I was a boy I used to wonder why some of the world's
wisest men hung out with whores.

CURTAIN

ACT III

_Same. Several hours later, about 10 P. M._ TED _is sitting in a
corner with a book, but unable to concentrate. He is wretchedly
unhappy and jumpy._

LAURA _paces back and forth._

MARTIN _sits at a table with a pencil, sketching, evidently
using_ TED, _whose face is exposed to him in profile, as a model._

_There is an air of tense, long waiting. Little is said, and then
spoken in quick and jerky tempo, with long pauses_.

LAURA. If I only knew where he was.

MARTIN. He's best alone, wherever he is--until he gets ready to
come home.

[_Silence._]

LAURA. If I knew he was all right!

MARTIN. He's all right.

[_Silence,_ LAURA _sits down apart from the others_, TED _rises and
crosses to her. She does not look at him. He speaks haltingly._]

TED. Laura. Is there anything I can do? I am very sorry, very sorry
it happened.

LAURA. [_Without looking up._] What good does that do now? You did
it.

TED. Yes, I did it. To say that he provoked me till I was crazed
with shame and anger does not undo it. That is true.

LAURA. All right, it's true. What he told you about yourself you
already knew. Everybody knew it. It was nothing but words and made
no real difference in your life. But you told him something about
himself that makes all the difference in the world--and has ruined
his life and mine. [_She rises._]

TED. I admit all that.

LAURA. [_Near hysteria._] Well, then, shut up! [_To escape from him
she goes into kitchen._]

MARTIN. [_Dryly, as he shades drawing._] The lady, it seems, would
have been quite satisfied if you had merely called her husband a
traitor to his country, a robber of blind widows, a bombastic
egotist, a thieving son-of-a-'bitch and a cock-eyed liar.

TED. [_Humorlessly._] It wasn't what I called him. It was what I
told him.

MARTIN. Precisely. The greater the truth the greater the libel. Ken
Holden, you see, wanted to be an adult lion among the little
monkeys, and you informed him that he was still an infant drawing
sustenance from parental sources.

TED. [_Sensing_ MARTI