CHARTERIS. Try and persuade him to join our club, Cuthbertson. He mopes.
JULIA. It's no use. Sylvia and I are always at him to join; but he won't.
CRAVEN. My child, I have my own club.
CHARTERIS (contemptuously). Yes, the Junior Army and Navy! Do you call that a club? Why, they daren't let a woman cross the doorstep!
CRAVEN (a little ruffled). Clubs are a matter of taste, Charteris. You like a cock and hen club: I don't. It's bad enough to have Julia and her sister—a girl under twenty—spending half their time at such a place. Besides, now really, such a name for a club! The Ibsen club! I should be laughed out of London. The Ibsen club! Come, Cuthbertson, back me up. I'm sure you agree with me.
CHARTERIS. Cuthbertson's a member.
CRAVEN (amazed). No! Why, he's been talking to me all the evening about the way in which everything is going to the dogs through advanced ideas in the younger generation.
CHARTERIS. Of course. He's been studying it in the club. He's always there.
CUTHBERTSON (warmly). Not always. Don't exaggerate, Charteris. You know very well that though I joined the club on Grace's account, thinking that her father's presence there would be a protection and a—a sort of sanction, as it were—I never approved of it.
CRAVEN (tactlessly harping on Cuthbertson's inconsistency). Well, you know, this is unexpected: now it's really very unexpected. I should never have thought it from hearing you talk, Jo. Why, you said the whole modern movement was abhorrent to you because your life had been passed in witnessing scenes of suffering nobly endured and sacrifice willingly rendered by womanly women and manly men and deuce knows what else. Is it at the Ibsen club that you see all this manliness and womanliness?