!" She
broke off and laughed. "Oh, I don't quite mean that. I am selfish. I
know I am. I love having my own way, but if I can't have a thing just as
I want it ... well, I'm content to have it in the way that I can. Now,
do you understand?"

Henry nodded his head.

"Gilbert isn't like me," she continued. "He says to himself, 'I must
have this thing exactly in this way. If I can't have it exactly in this
way, then I won't have it at all!' and it's so silly of him to behave
like that!"

Henry looked up at her in a puzzled fashion. "What is it he wants?... I
beg your pardon, I'm being impertinent!"

"Oh, no!" she replied, smiling graciously at him. "He wants ... oh, he
wants everything like that. Haven't you noticed?"

"No," Henry answered, "I haven't."

"Well, you will some day. My motto is, Take what you can get in the way
you can get it. It's so much easier to live if you act on that
principle!"

"Gilbert's an artist, Lady Cecily, and he can't act on that principle.
No artist can. He takes what he wants in the way that he wants it or
else he will not take it at all!"

"Exactly. That's what I've been saying. And it's so silly. But never
mind. He's young yet, and he'll learn!"

She turned to gaze at the audience, and Henry, not knowing what else to
do and having no more to say, looked too. He could think of plenty of
fine things to say to her, but he could not get them on to his tongue.
He wanted to tell her that he had scarcely heard a word of what was said
in the first act of the play because he had filled his mind with
thoughts of her, and had spent most of the time in gazing up at her as
she sat leaning on the ledge of her box; but when he tried to speak, his
mouth seemed to be parched and his tongue would not move.

3

"Do you like this play?" she asked.

"No," he replied.

"Why? I thought everybody admired Wilde's wit. It's clever, isn't it?"

"I don't like it!"

"But it's supposed to be awfully clever!" she insisted.

"It's a common melodrama with bits of wit and epigram stuck on to it!"
Henry answered.

"Oh, really!"

"The wit isn't natural ... it doesn't grow naturally out of the life of
the play, I mean. It's stuck on like ... like plaster images on the
front of a house. The witty speeches aren't spontaneous ... they don't
come inevitably!... I'm afraid I'm not making myself very clear, but
anyhow, I don't like the play. I don't like anything Wilde wrote, except
'The Ballad of Reading