bout engineering or electricity or insurance. I don't even know
arithmetic well. Outside mathematics, lawn-tennis, eating, sleeping,
cycling, and walking, I'm a more ignorant barbarian than any woman could
possibly be who hadn't gone in for the tripos.

PRAED [revolted] What a monstrous, wicked, rascally system! I knew it!
I felt at once that it meant destroying all that makes womanhood
beautiful!

VIVIE. I don't object to it on that score in the least. I shall turn it
to very good account, I assure you.

PRAED. Pooh! In what way?

VIVIE. I shall set up chambers in the City, and work at actuarial
calculations and conveyancing. Under cover of that I shall do some law,
with one eye on the Stock Exchange all the time. I've come down here by
myself to read law: not for a holiday, as my mother imagines. I hate
holidays.

PRAED. You make my blood run cold. Are you to have no romance, no beauty
in your life?

VIVIE. I don't care for either, I assure you.

PRAED. You can't mean that.

VIVIE. Oh yes I do. I like working and getting paid for it. When I'm
tired of working, I like a comfortable chair, a cigar, a little whisky,
and a novel with a good detective story in it.

PRAED [rising in a frenzy of repudiation] I don't believe it. I am an
artist; and I can't believe it: I refuse to believe it. It's only that
you havn't discovered yet what a wonderful world art can open up to you.

VIVIE. Yes I have. Last May I spent six weeks in London with Honoria
Fraser. Mamma thought we were doing a round of sightseeing together; but
I was really at Honoria's chambers in Chancery Lane every day, working
away at actuarial calculations for her, and helping her as well as a
greenhorn could. In the evenings we smoked and talked, and never dreamt
of going out except for exercise. And I never enjoyed myself more in my
life.

I cleared all my expenses and got initiated into the business without a
fee in the bargain.

PRAED. But bless my heart and soul, Miss Warren, do you call that
discovering art?

VIVIE. Wait a bit. That wasn't the beginning. I went up to town on an
invitation from some artistic people in Fitzjohn's Avenue: one of the
girls was a Newnham chum. They took me to the National Gallery--

PRAED [approving] Ah!! [He sits down, much relieved].

VIVIE [continuing]--to the Opera--

PRAED [still more pleased] Good!

VIVIE.--and to a concert where the band played all the evening:
Beethoven and Wagner and so on. I would