Act I - Page 2

nor the appetite to have his cooking done there. The
windows, high up in the wall, look north and south. The north
window is the largest; and if we look into the kitchen through it
we see facing us the south wall with small Norman windows and an
open door near the corner to the left. Through this door we have
a glimpse of the garden, and of a garden chair in the sunshine.
In the right-hand corner is an entrance to a vaulted circular
chamber with a winding stair leading up through a tower to the
upper floors of the palace. In the wall to our right is the
immense fireplace, with its huge spit like a baby crane, and a
collection of old iron and brass instruments which pass as the
original furniture of the fire, though as a matter of fact they
have been picked up from time to time by the Bishop at secondhand
shops. In the near end of the left hand wall a small Norman door
gives access to the Bishop's study, formerly a scullery. Further
along, a great oak chest stands against the wall. Across the
middle of the kitchen is a big timber table surrounded by eleven
stout rush-bottomed chairs: four on the far side, three on the
near side, and two at each end. There is a big chair with railed
back and sides on the hearth. On the floor is a drugget of thick
fibre matting. The only other piece of furniture is a clock with
a wooden dial about as large as the bottom of a washtub, the
weights, chains, and pendulum being of corresponding magnitude;
but the Bishop has long since abandoned the attempt to keep it
going. It hangs above the oak chest.

The kitchen is occupied at present by the Bishop's lady, Mrs
Bridgenorth, who is talking to Mr William Collins, the
greengrocer. He is in evening dress, though it is early forenoon.
Mrs Bridgenorth is a quiet happy-looking woman of fifty or
thereabouts, placid, gentle, and humorous, with delicate features
and fine grey hair with many white threads. She is dressed as for
some festivity; but she is taking things easily as she sits in
the big chair by the hearth, reading The Times.

Collins is an elderly man with a rather youthful waist. His
muttonchop whiskers have a coquettish touch of Dundreary at their
lower ends. He is an affable man, with those perfect manners
which can be acquired only in keeping a shop for the sale of
necessaries of life to ladies whose social position is so
unquestionable that they are not anxious about it. He is a
reassuring man, with a vigilant grey eye, and the power of saying
anything he likes to you without offence, because his tone always
implies that he does it with your kind permission. Withal by no
means servile: rather gallant and compassionate, but never
without a conscientious recognition, on public grounds, of social