ROYCE (his annoyance gone). Doesn’t matter.
OLIVER. No, do go on, Mr. Blayds-Royce.
ROYCE. Very well, Mr. Blayds-Conway. I am old enough to be—no, not your grandfather—your uncle—and I want to say this. Oliver Blayds is a very great man and also a very old man, and I think that while you live in the house of this very great man, the inconveniences to which his old age puts you, my dear Conway——
OLIVER. Blayds-Conway.
ROYCE (smiling). Blayds-Conway, I’m sorry.
OLIVER. Perhaps you’d better call me Oliver.
ROYCE. Yes, I think I will. Well, then, Oliver——
OLIVER. Yes, but you’ve missed the whole point. The whole point is that I don’t want to live in his house. [187]Do you realise that I’ve never had a house I could call my own? I mean a house where I could ask people. I brought you along this afternoon because you’d got permission to come anyhow with that Address of yours. But I shouldn’t have dared to bring anybody else along from the club. Here we all are, and always have been, living not our lives, but his life. Because—well, just because he likes it so.
ROYCE (almost to himself). Yes ... yes.... I know.
OLIVER. Well!