[She bursts into tears and then stops, seeing that her effort has failed, for a sombre silence ensues. Angela has risen and is looking at Lord Gumthorpe. Lord Gumthorpe is standing with his arms folded. He has just lost a bishop in the dim chiaroscuro of the window-seat and has not heard her outbreak. Suddenly he looks up, and fixes his eyes upon Lady Gastwyck with a new sense of resolution. He advances towards her, and gazing boldly at her eyebrow, that looks more than ever like a moustache, calls out in a thin cruel voice.
Lord Gumthorpe. Why don't you wax the ends?
[The effect of this bizarre question is startling. Angela turns and smiles gently like one who has done one's best at a deathbed, and is almost relieved that the end has come. She walks almost serenely across the room to the sideboard, and, taking up a piece of cheese and three bananas, goes off to bed. But the effect on Lady Gastwyck is different, for directly she hears Lord Gumthorpe make this remark she realizes that he is a weak man.
There is a pond at the end of the lawn covered with green sedge. She shivers. She has courage, but not that sort of courage. She rises and leans against the Adams' fireplace. The Adams' fireplace leans against her. It falls on to her with a tremendous crash.... Lord Gumthorpe comes forward and gazes at the jumbled débris. He is conscious of a sense of despairing conflict—the conflict between contemplative amazement and some natural but well-controlled demand for concrete action. An appalling conviction comes to him that he ought to do something. Under the fallen mess of brick, marble, and wood there are feeble undulations. A phrase keeps running through his mind—"Expressing her primitive virility." He tries to think where he has read it, and what it means, and how it could apply to the present case. The undulations cease. He decides that the phrase could not apply to it. He returns to the window-seat. A new horror obsesses him. The moon has moved round. The chessboard has been blotted out. In extremis, Lord Gumthorpe falls back on his primitive instincts and rings for the butler. There is an imperceptible pause. Stud glides in and stands in the middle of the room, tears of reverence and respectability streaming down his cheeks.
Lord Gumthorpe. (after an interminable pause). Your mistress has dropped her fan into the fireplace!
[With a little croon of pleasure, Stud falls towards the fireplace. Suddenly he stops, beholding the-fallen wreckage. For a fraction of a second the fetters of a generation of servile habits are almost broken. A fugitive expression of surprise passes over his face. Then, remembering himself, he stumbles over the débris and, groping among the cinders, picks up the fan.
Stud (with finesse). Here is the fan, my Lord. Shall I present it to her Ladyship?
Lord Gumthorpe. (with extraordinary subtlety). No, you may keep it. Her Ladyship does not require it.
[Stud goes out with the fan. Lord Gumthorpe stands irresolutely warming his hands at the fire. Angela's father from Atlantis, Tennessee, is heard outside in the hall eating cantaloup. The pips rattle against the door. Unable to withstand this further symbol of inevitable doom, Lord Gumthorpe throws himself on to the fire. He is burnt up. The fire is blotted out. Everything is blotted out.