The trap has sprung and he is caught fast.
“I don’t know anything about women,” wails the duellist of sex, pathetically. “Twelve years’ experience is not enough.”
William, the waiter at the hotel, reads the moral.
“You never can tell, sir,” he says, “You never can tell.”
So much for the love making, which you will find, in slightly different form in “Widowers’ Houses” and “Man and Superman.” The battle between the Cramptons, husband and wife, is a more serious thing. In some mysterious way the dramatist manages to keep the spectator from sympathizing with either, but Crampton, nevertheless, is a character in a tragedy and not in a comedy. It is all a ghastly horror to him—the flight of his wife, the cynical, worldwise impudence and grotesque individualism of his children, the perversity and topsy-turveyness of the whole domestic drama. He is no martyr, by any means, for life in his company, it is evident, would be an excellent imitation of existence in a cage with a tiger, but if he is not lovable, he at least has a great capacity for loving. He and Gloria have a memorable encounter, in which she explains her theory of conduct in detail.
“You see,” she says triumphantly, at the end, “everything comes right if we only think it resolutely out.”
“No,” says Crampton sullenly, “I don’t think. I want you to feel: that’s the only thing that can help us....”
In the end he succumbs to the inevitable senilely.
“Ho! ho! He! he! he!” he laughs, as Gloria bears Valentine away. And then, say the stage directions, “he goes into the garden, chuckling at the fun.”
Somehow the boundless humor of the play is forgotten long before this undercurrent of ironic pathos.