Pauline.
Pain me? I am delighted with it! Why, it explains everything. It explains me. It explains you, even. A Miss Chapel might marry anyone. Don’t frown, Claude; laugh. We shall never get into Society in Lyons, but, at least, we shall never have another visit from mamma. The worst has happened. We can now live happily ever afterwards.
Curtain.
Caste.
Most people, in their day, have wept tears of relief at the ending of T. W. Robertson’s comedy “Caste,” when the Hon. George D’Alroy—not dead, poor chap!—falls into the arms of his wife, Esther, while his father-in-law, Eccles, bestows a drunken benediction upon him before starting for Jersey, and his sister-in-law, Polly, and her adored plumber, Gerridge, embrace sympathetically in the background. In these circumstances it seems hardly kind to add a further act to this harrowing drama. But the writer of Sequels, like Nemesis, is inexorable. If the perusal of the following scene prevents any young subaltern from emulating D’Alroy and marrying a ballet-dancer with a drunken father, it will not have been written in vain.
THE VENGEANCE OF CASTE.
Scene.—The dining-room of the D’Alroys’ house in the suburbs. Dinner is just over, and George D’Alroy, in a seedy coat and carpet slippers, is sitting by the fire smoking a pipe. On the other side of the fire sits Esther, his wife, darning a sock.