“Send for her!” he roars. “Send for her and let her choose between us!”
Aha, my masters! what a scene is this!—what a scene of mad passion for the gallery to linger over breathlessly, for the orchestra to greet with stares and for the critics to belabor and dissect in the morning!
Candida comes in and the two bid for her heart and helping hand.
“I have nothing to offer you,” says Morell, with proud humility, “but my strength for your defense, my honesty of purpose for your surety, my ability and industry for your livelihood, and my authority and position for your dignity. That is all it becomes a man to offer a woman.”
“And you, Eugene?” asks Candida quietly. “What do you offer?”
“My weakness!” exclaims the poet passionately. “My desolation! My heart’s need!”
“That’s a good bid,” says Candida judicially. “Now I know how to make my choice.”
Then she pauses and looks curiously from one to the other, as if weighing them. Morell, whose lofty confidence has once more changed into heart-breaking dread, loses all power over himself and in a suffocating voice—the appeal bursting from the depths of his anguish—cries “Candida!”
“Coward!” shrieks Eugene, divining the victory in the surrender. And Candida—O most virtuous of wives!—says blandly, “I give myself to the weaker of the two” and falls into her husband’s arms. It is a situation that struck the first night audience at the Berkeley Lyceum as one eminently agreeable and refined.
As Shaw explains, the poet, despite the fact that “his face whitens like steel in a furnace that cannot melt it,” is a gainer by Candida’s choice. He enters the Morell home a sentimental boy yearning for an emotional outlet. He leaves it a man who has shouldered his cross and felt the unutterable stimulus of sacrifice. Candida makes a man of him, says Shaw, by showing him his strength. David finds that he must do without Uriah’s wife.