HARRY (whom this kind of retort helps to put at his ease). No offence. It’s a French expression, and many a happy moment have I given to the mademoiselles by calling them cabbages. But the drawing-room! I was a little shaver when I was here last, but I mind we called the drawing-room the Big Room; it wasn’t a little box like this.
MRS. OTERY. This is the biggest room in the house. (She quotes drearily from some advertisement which is probably hanging in rags on the gate.) Specially charming is the drawing-room with its superb view of the Downs. This room is upstairs and is approached by——
HARRY. By a stair, containing some romantic rat-holes. Snakes, whether it’s the room or not, it strikes cold; there is something shiversome about it.
(For the first time she gives him a sharp glance.)
I’ve shivered in many a shanty in Australy, and thought of the big room at home and the warmth of it. The warmth! And now this is the best it can do for the prodigal when he returns to it expecting to see that calf done to a turn. We live and learn, missis.
MRS. OTERY. We live, at any rate.
HARRY. Well said, my cabbage.
MRS. OTERY. Thank you, my rhododendron.
HARRY (cheered). I like your spirit. You and me would get on great if I had time to devote to your amusement. But, see here, I can make sure whether this was the drawing-room. If it was, there is an apple-tree outside there, with one of its branches scraping on the window. I ought to know, for it was out at the window down that apple-tree to the ground that I slided one dark night when I was a twelve-year-old, ran away from home, the naughty blue-eyed angel that I was, and set off to make my fortune on the blasted ocean. The fortune, my—my lady friend—has still got the start of me, but the apple-tree should be there to welcome her darling boy.
(He pulls down the sacking, which lets a little more light into the room. We see that the window, which reaches to the floor, opens outwards. There were probably long ago steps from it down into the garden, but they are gone now, and gone too is the apple-tree.)