Oscar Wilde: Lady Windermere's Fan

4. FOURTH ACT (continued)

LADY WINDERMERE. [Returning.] I'm afraid it is very flattering--I am not so pretty as that. [Showing photograph.]

MRS. ERLYNNE. You are much prettier. But haven't you got one of yourself with your little boy?

LADY WINDERMERE. I have. Would you prefer one of those?

MRS. ERLYNNE. Yes.

LADY WINDERMERE. I'll go and get it for you, if you'll excuse me for a moment. I have one upstairs.

MRS. ERLYNNE. So sorry, Lady Windermere, to give you so much trouble.

LADY WINDERMERE. [Moves to door R.] No trouble at all, Mrs. Erlynne.

MRS. ERLYNNE. Thanks so much.

[Exit LADY WINDERMERE R.] You seem rather out of temper this morning, Windermere. Why should you be? Margaret and I get on charmingly together.

LORD WINDERMERE. I can't bear to see you with her. Besides, you have not told me the truth, Mrs. Erlynne.

MRS. ERLYNNE. I have not told HER the truth, you mean.

LORD WINDERMERE. [Standing C.] I sometimes wish you had. I should have been spared then the misery, the anxiety, the annoyance of the last six months. But rather than my wife should know--that the mother whom she was taught to consider as dead, the mother whom she has mourned as dead, is living--a divorced woman, going about under an assumed name, a bad woman preying upon life, as I know you now to be--rather than that, I was ready to supply you with money to pay bill after bill, extravagance after extravagance, to risk what occurred yesterday, the first quarrel I have ever had with my wife. You don't understand what that means to me. How could you? But I tell you that the only bitter words that ever came from those sweet lips of hers were on your account, and I hate to see you next her. You sully the innocence that is in her. [Moves L.C.] And then I used to think that with all your faults you were frank and honest. You are not.