nry, why didn't you try to restrain
your feelings a little in common consideration for me? Why didn't you
write with some little reserve?

HE. Write poems to you with reserve! You ask me that!

SHE [with perfunctory tenderness] Yes, dear, of course it was very nice
of you; and I know it was my own fault as much as yours. I ought to have
noticed that your verses ought never to have been addressed to a married
woman.

HE. Ah, how I wish they had been addressed to an unmarried woman! how I
wish they had!

SHE. Indeed you have no right to wish anything of the sort. They are
quite unfit for anybody but a married woman. That's just the difficulty.
What will my sisters-in-law think of them?

HE [painfully jarred] Have you got sisters-in-law?

SHE. Yes, of course I have. Do you suppose I am an angel?

HE [biting his lips] I do. Heaven help me, I do--or I did--or [he almost
chokes a sob].

SHE [softening and putting her hand caressingly on his shoulder] Listen
to me, dear. It's very nice of you to live with me in a dream, and to
love me, and so on; but I can't help my husband having disagreeable
relatives, can I?

HE [brightening up] Ah, of course they are your husband's relatives: I
forgot that. Forgive me, Aurora. [He takes her hand from his shoulder
and kisses it. She sits down on the stool. He remains near the table,
with his back to it, smiling fatuously down at her].

SHE. The fact is, Teddy's got nothing but relatives. He has eight
sisters and six half-sisters, and ever so many brothers--but I don't
mind his brothers. Now if you only knew the least little thing about
the world, Henry, you'd know that in a large family, though the sisters
quarrel with one another like mad all the time, yet let one of the
brothers marry, and they all turn on their unfortunate sister-in-law and
devote the rest of their lives with perfect unanimity to persuading
him that his wife is unworthy of him. They can do it to her very face
without her knowing it, because there are always a lot of stupid low
family jokes that nobody understands but themselves. Half the time you
can't tell what they're talking about: it just drives you wild. There
ought to be a law against a man's sister ever entering his house after
he's married. I'm as certain as that I'm sitting here that Georgina
stole those poems out of my workbox.

HE. She will not understand them, I think.

SHE. Oh, won't she! She'll understand them only too well. She'll
understan