Then after much painful probing as to why he has so suddenly changed his attitude towards the scheme, she elicits the reason.
Sir Robert Chiltern. But if I told you——
Lady Chiltern. What?
Sir Robert Chiltern. That it was necessary, vitally necessary.
Lady Chiltern. It can never be necessary to do what is not honourable.... Robert, tell me why you are going to do this dishonourable thing?
Sir Robert Chiltern. Gertrude, you have no right to use that word. I told you it was a question of rational compromise. It is no more than that.
But Lady Chiltern is not to be so easily put off as that. Her suspicions are aroused. She says she knows that there are "men with horrible secrets in their lives—men who had done some shameful thing, and who, in some critical moment, have to pay for it, by doing some other act of shame." She asks him boldly, is he one of these? Then, driven to bay, he tells her the one lie of his life.
Sir Robert Chiltern. Gertrude, there is nothing in my past life that you might not know.
She is satisfied. But he must write a letter to Mrs Cheveley, taking back any promise he may have given her, and that letter must be written at once. He tries to gain time, offers to go and see Mrs Cheveley to-morrow; it is too late to-night. But Lady Chiltern is inexorable, and so Sir Robert yields, and the missive is despatched to Claridge's Hotel. Then, seized with a sudden terror of what the consequences may be, he turns, with nerves all a-quiver, to his wife, pleadingly—
Sir Robert Chiltern. O, love me always, Gertrude, love me always.
Lady Chiltern. I will love you always, because you will always be worthy of love. We needs must love the highest when we see it! (Kisses him, rises and goes out.)
And the curtain falls upon this intensely emotional situation.
If I may seem to have quoted too freely from the dialogue, it is in part to refute the charge, so often urged by the critics, that Oscar Wilde's "talk is often an end in itself, it has no vital connection with the particular play of which it forms a part, it might as well be put into the mouth of one character as another...." Now in the first act of "The Ideal Husband," when the action of the piece is being carried on at high pressure, there is not a word of the dialogue that is not pertinent, no sentence that is not significant. Whatever of wit the author may have allowed himself to indulge in springs spontaneously from the woof of the story, it is not, as was suggested in his earlier plays, "a mere parasitic growth attached to it," in which this particular comedy under consideration marks an immense advance on the methods of "The Woman Of No Importance." Here is strenuous drama, treated strenuously, and dealing with the whole gamut of human emotions. The playwright, as he progresses in his art, does not here permit himself to endanger the interest of the plot by any adventitious pleasantries on the part of the characters.
In the second act we are again in Grosvenor Square, this time in a morning-room, where Sir Robert Chiltern and Lord Goring are discussing the awkward state of affairs. To Lord Goring the action of Sir Robert appears inexcusable.
Lord Goring. Robert, how could you have sold yourself for money?
Sir Robert Chiltern. (Excitedly.) I did not sell myself for money. I bought success at a great price. That is all.