really, mother, I know so little about them; and what I do
know is so painful--it is so impossible to mention some things to
you--[he stops, ashamed].

LADY BRITOMART. I suppose you mean your father.

STEPHEN [almost inaudibly] Yes.

LADY BRITOMART. My dear: we can't go on all our lives not
mentioning him. Of course you were quite right not to open the
subject until I asked you to; but you are old enough now to be
taken into my confidence, and to help me to deal with him about
the girls.

STEPHEN. But the girls are all right. They are engaged.

LADY BRITOMART [complacently] Yes: I have made a very good match
for Sarah. Charles Lomax will be a millionaire at 35. But that is
ten years ahead; and in the meantime his trustees cannot under
the terms of his father's will allow him more than 800 pounds a
year.

STEPHEN. But the will says also that if he increases his income
by his own exertions, they may double the increase.

LADY BRITOMART. Charles Lomax's exertions are much more likely to
decrease his income than to increase it. Sarah will have to find
at least another 800 pounds a year for the next ten years; and
even then they will be as poor as church mice. And what about
Barbara? I thought Barbara was going to make the most brilliant
career of all of you. And what does she do? Joins the Salvation
Army; discharges her maid; lives on a pound a week; and walks in
one evening with a professor of Greek whom she has picked up in
the street, and who pretends to be a Salvationist, and actually
plays the big drum for her in public because he has fallen head
over ears in love with her.

STEPHEN. I was certainly rather taken aback when I heard they
were engaged. Cusins is a very nice fellow, certainly: nobody
would ever guess that he was born in Australia; but--

LADY BRITOMART. Oh, Adolphus Cusins will make a very good
husband. After all, nobody can say a word against Greek: it
stamps a man at once as an educated gentleman. And my family,
thank Heaven, is not a pig-headed Tory one. We are Whigs, and
believe in liberty. Let snobbish people say what they please:
Barbara shall marry, not the man they like, but the man I like.

STEPHEN. Of course I was thinking only of his income. However, he
is not likely to be extravagant.

LADY BRITOMART. Don't be too sure of that, Stephen. I know your
quiet, simple, refined, poetic people like Adolphus--quite
content with the best of everything! They cost more than your
extravaga