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Page 6
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
extravagant people, who are always as mean as they are second
rate. No: Barbara will need at least 2000 pounds a year. You see
it means two additional households. Besides, my dear, you must
marry soon. I don't approve of the present fashion of
philandering bachelors and late marriages; and I am trying to
arrange something for you.
STEPHEN. It's very good of you, mother; but perhaps I had better
arrange that for myself.
LADY BRITOMART. Nonsense! you are much too young to begin
matchmaking: you would be taken in by some pretty little nobody.
Of course I don't mean that you are not to be consulted: you know
that as well as I do. [Stephen closes his lips and is silent].
Now don't sulk, Stephen.
STEPHEN. I am not sulking, mother. What has all this got to do
with--with--with my father?
LADY BRITOMART. My dear Stephen: where is the money to come from?
It is easy enough for you and the other children to live on my
income as long as we are in the same house; but I can't keep four
families in four separate houses. You know how poor my father is:
he has barely seven thousand a year now; and really, if he were
not the Earl of Stevenage, he would have to give up society. He
can do nothing for us: he says, naturally enough, that it is
absurd that he should be asked to provide for the children of a
man who is rolling in money. You see, Stephen, your father must
be fabulously wealthy, because there is always a war going on
somewhere.
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