cherish any delusions as to their being capable of
supporting their wives. [The butler enters: Lady Britomart goes
behind the settee to speak to him]. Morrison: go up to the
drawingroom and tell everybody to come down here at once.
[Morrison withdraws. Lady Britomart turns to Stephen]. Now
remember, Stephen, I shall need all your countenance and
authority. [He rises and tries to recover some vestige of these
attributes]. Give me a chair, dear. [He pushes a chair forward
from the wall to where she stands, near the smaller writing
table. She sits down; and he goes to the armchair, into which he
throws himself]. I don't know how Barbara will take it. Ever
since they made her a major in the Salvation Army she has
developed a propensity to have her own way and order people about
which quite cows me sometimes. It's not ladylike: I'm sure I
don't know where she picked it up. Anyhow, Barbara shan't bully
me; but still it's just as well that your father should be here
before she has time to refuse to meet him or make a fuss. Don't
look nervous, Stephen, it will only encourage Barbara to make
difficulties. I am nervous enough, goodness knows; but I don't
show it.

Sarah and Barbara come in with their respective young men,
Charles Lomax and Adolphus Cusins. Sarah is slender, bored, and
mundane. Barbara is robuster, jollier, much more energetic. Sarah
is fashionably dressed: Barbara is in Salvation Army uniform.
Lomax, a young man about town, is like many other young men about
town. He is affected with a frivolous sense of humor which
plunges him at the most inopportune moments into paroxysms of
imperfectly suppressed laughter. Cusins is a spectacled student,
slight, thin haired, and sweet voiced, with a more complex form
of Lomax's complaint. His sense of humor is intellectual and
subtle, and is complicated by an appalling temper. The lifelong
struggle of a benevolent temperament and a high conscience
against impulses of inhuman ridicule and fierce impatience has
set up a chronic strain which has visibly wrecked his constitution.
He is a most implacable, determined, tenacious, intolerant person
who by mere force of character presents himself as--and indeed
actually is--considerate, gentle, explanatory, even mild and
apologetic, capable possibly of murder, but not of cruelty or
coarseness. By the operation of some instinct which is not merciful
enough to blind him with the illusions of love, he is obstinately
bent on marrying