Those persons who have seen Mrs. Patrick Campbell’s magnificent performance in “The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith” will have probably gone away with a quite false impression of the gentleman with whom Agnes Ebbsmith spent her eight years of married life. “For the first twelve months,” she declares bitterly in the first act, “he treated me like a woman in a harem, for the rest of the time like a beast of burden.” This is not quite just to poor Ebbsmith, who was a good sort of fellow in his commonplace way, and it is manifestly unfair that the audience should have no opportunity of hearing his side of the question. An attempt is made to remedy this injustice in the following Prologue, which all fair-minded persons are entreated to read before seeing Mr. Pinero’s very clever play.
THE UNFORTUNATE MR. EBBSMITH.
Scene.—The dining-room of the Ebbsmiths’ house in West Kensington. Agnes and her husband are at breakfast. They have been married seven years. She looks much as we see her in the early acts of the play—gaunt, pale, badly dressed. He is a careworn man with hair slightly grey at the temples, an anxious forehead and sad eyes. He is glancing through the “Standard” in the intervals of eating his bacon. She is absorbed in the “Morning Screamer,” one of the more violent Socialist-Radical organs of that day. Presently Ebbsmith looks up.
You won’t forget, Agnes, that we are expecting people to dinner to-night?
Agnes.
[Putting down her paper with an air of patient endurance.] Eh?
Ebbsmith.
[Mildly.] I was saying, dear, if you will give me your attention for a moment, that I hoped you would not forget that Sir Myles Jawkins and his wife and the Spencers and the Thorntons were dining here to-night.