OVERHEARD FRAGMENT OF A DIALOGUE
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Lord Illingworth. My dear Goring, I assure you that a well-tied tie is the first serious step in life.
Lord Goring. My dear Illingworth, five well-made button-holes a day are far more essential. They please women, and women rule society.
"Full of good things!"
Lord Illingworth. I understood you considered women of no importance?
Lord Goring. My dear George, a man's life revolves on curves of intellect. It is on the hard lines of the emotions that a woman's life progresses. Both revolve in cycles of masterpieces. They should revolve on bi-cycles; built, if possible, for two. But I am keeping you?
Lord Illingworth. I wish you were. Nowadays it is only the poor who are kept at the expense of the rich.
Lord Goring. Yes. It is perfectly comic, the number of young men going about the world nowadays who adopt perfect profiles as a useful profession.
Lord Illingworth. Surely that must be the next world? How about the Chiltern Thousands?
Lord Goring. Don't. George. Have you seen Windermere lately? Dear Windermere! I should like to be exactly unlike Windermere.
Lord Illingworth. Poor Windermere! He spends his mornings in doing what is possible, and his evenings in saying what is probable. By the way, do you really understand all I say?
Lord Goring. Yes, when I don't listen attentively.
Lord Illingworth. Reach me the matches, like a good boy—thanks. Now—define these cigarettes—as tobacco.
Lord Goring. My dear George, they are atrocious. And they leave me unsatisfied.
Lord Illingworth. You are a promising disciple of mine. The only use of a disciple is that at the moment of one's triumph he stands behind one's chair and shouts that after all he is immortal.
Lord Goring. You are quite right. It is as well, too, to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be learnt.
Lord Illingworth. Certainly, and ugliness is the root of all industry.
Lord Goring. George, your conversation is delightful, but your views are terribly unsound. You are always saying insincere things.
Lord Illingworth. If one tells the truth, one is sure sooner or later to be found out.
Lord Goring. Perhaps. The sky is like a hard hollow sapphire. It is too late to sleep. I shall go down to Covent Garden and look at the roses. Good-night, George! I have had such a pleasant evening!
DEATH IN THE CUP.
["The social duty of paying calls, refreshed, as it necessarily is, by frequent cups of tepid tea, is apparently little better than a process of slow poisoning."—Daily Graphic.]
"A word to you, Amanda mine!"
Oh, here's a pretty state of things! Whenever you go calling, And take this deadly liquor and imbibe it without stint, You're certainly preparing a catastrophe appalling, Your mirth is as the little lamb's, unmindful of the mint. And when your entertainer, who seems so sweetly placid And quite unlike a criminal, suggests "Another cup?" She might as well be offering a dose of prussic acid, And the Public Prosecutor ought to take the matter up! "The cup that cheers"—that hackneyed phrase is frightfully in error, If seldom it "inebriates" (it does, the doctors plead), There lurks within its fatal draught a more efficient terror, 'Twill shortly make a funeral your one and only need! So since a daily cup or two the thin end of the wedge is, And since this revelation of our danger has been made, We all will wear red ribbons and will sign the strictest pledges, And speedily inaugurate an "Anti-Tea" crusade. A word to you, Amanda mine. Unless your cruel kindness, Your efforts to consign me to an early grave, shall cease, And if you dare, presuming on my long-continued blindness, To offer me a cup of tea—I'll send for the police!
The Time of Day.—Good, after Newnes to find the style "Bart." The bestowal of the baronetcy quite a Tit-Bit for the Strand. But there is no truth in the report that the event will be followed by the establishment of a new morning paper to be called The Dragon, and edited by Sir George.