ou
ask her to lend you a penny.

SORIN. You have taken it into your head that your mother dislikes your
play, and the thought of it has excited you, and all. Keep calm; your
mother adores you.

TREPLIEFF. [Pulling a flower to pieces] She loves me, loves me not;
loves--loves me not; loves--loves me not! [Laughing] You see, she
doesn't love me, and why should she? She likes life and love and gay
clothes, and I am already twenty-five years old; a sufficient reminder
to her that she is no longer young. When I am away she is only
thirty-two, in my presence she is forty-three, and she hates me for
it. She knows, too, that I despise the modern stage. She adores it, and
imagines that she is working on it for the benefit of humanity and her
sacred art, but to me the theatre is merely the vehicle of convention
and prejudice. When the curtain rises on that little three-walled room,
when those mighty geniuses, those high-priests of art, show us people in
the act of eating, drinking, loving, walking, and wearing their coats,
and attempt to extract a moral from their insipid talk; when playwrights
give us under a thousand different guises the same, same, same old
stuff, then I must needs run from it, as Maupassant ran from the Eiffel
Tower that was about to crush him by its vulgarity.

SORIN. But we can't do without a theatre.

TREPLIEFF. No, but we must have it under a new form. If we can't do
that, let us rather not have it at all. [Looking at his watch] I love my
mother, I love her devotedly, but I think she leads a stupid life. She
always has this man of letters of hers on her mind, and the newspapers
are always frightening her to death, and I am tired of it. Plain, human
egoism sometimes speaks in my heart, and I regret that my mother is
a famous actress. If she were an ordinary woman I think I should be
a happier man. What could be more intolerable and foolish than my
position, Uncle, when I find myself the only nonentity among a crowd of
her guests, all celebrated authors and artists? I feel that they only
endure me because I am her son. Personally I am nothing, nobody. I
pulled through my third year at college by the skin of my teeth, as they
say. I have neither money nor brains, and on my passport you may read
that I am simply a citizen of Kiev. So was my father, but he was
a well-known actor. When the celebrities that frequent my mother's
drawing-room deign to notice me at all, I know they only look at me
to measure my