MAGGIE. Please, Mr. Venables, I should like to know.
[He sits down with a sigh and obeys.]
VENABLES. Your husband has been writing the speech here, and by his own wish he read it to me three days ago. The occasion is to be an important one; and, well, there are a dozen young men in the party at present, all capable of filling a certain small ministerial post. [He looks longingly at the mower, but it sends no message to his aid.] And as he is one of them I was anxious that he should show in this speech of what he is capable.
MAGGIE. And hasn’t he?
[Not for the first time MR. VENABLES wishes that he was not in politics.]
VENABLES. I am afraid he has.
COMTESSE. What is wrong with the speech, Charles?
VENABLES. Nothing—and he can still deliver it. It is a powerful, well-thought-out piece of work, such as only a very able man could produce. But it has no SPECIAL QUALITY of its own—none of the little touches that used to make an old stager like myself want to pat Shand on the shoulder. [The COMTESSE’s mouth twitches, but MAGGIE declines to notice it.] He pounds on manfully enough, but, if I may say so, with a wooden leg. It is as good, I dare say, as the rest of them could have done; but they start with such inherited advantages, Mrs. Shand, that he had to do better.
MAGGIE. Yes, I can understand that.
VENABLES. I am sorry, Mrs. Shand, for he interested me. His career has set me wondering whether if I had begun as a railway porter I might not still be calling out, ‘By your leave.’