Michael and His Lost Angel: A Play in Five Acts

by Henry Arthur Jones

MICH. (troubled). Yes! Yes! Very welcome! The Church owes much to you.

AUDR. I think she does, for she has robbed me of your love. Why have you sent back all my letters unopened?

MICH. Can’t you guess what it cost me to return them? (Pause.) What have you been doing all this last year?

AUDR. Doing? Eating my heart. Racing through my life to get to the end of it. Skipping and chattering from Hyde Park Corner to the Inferno by a new short cut. What have you been doing?

MICH. Trying to repent and to forget.

AUDR. Ah, well—I haven’t been wasting my time quite so foolishly as you after all.

MICH. Will you never be serious?

AUDR. Yes—soon.

MICH. You’ve been ill?

AUDR. Oh, my dear spiritual doctor, you don’t know how ill I’ve been. I get up every morning without hope, I drag through the day without hope, I go to this thing and that, to this party, to that reception, to the theatre, to church, to a pigeon-shooting match, to the park, to Ascot, to Henley—here, there, everywhere, all without hope.