Act I

Great George Street, Westminster, is the address of Doyle and
Broadbent, civil engineers. On the threshold one reads that the
firm consists of Mr Lawrence Doyle and Mr Thomas Broadbent, and
that their rooms are on the first floor. Most of their rooms are
private; for the partners, being bachelors and bosom friends,
live there; and the door marked Private, next the clerks' office,
is their domestic sitting room as well as their reception room
for clients. Let me describe it briefly from the point of view of
a sparrow on the window sill. The outer door is in the opposite
wall, close to the right hand corner. Between this door and the
left hand corner is a hatstand and a table consisting of large
drawing boards on trestles, with plans, rolls of tracing paper,
mathematical instruments and other draughtsman's accessories on
it. In the left hand wall is the fireplace, and the door of an
inner room between the fireplace and our observant sparrow.
Against the right hand wall is a filing cabinet, with a cupboard
on it, and, nearer, a tall office desk and stool for one person.
In the middle of the room a large double writing table is set
across, with a chair at each end for the two partners. It is a
room which no woman would tolerate, smelling of tobacco, and much
in need of repapering, repainting, and recarpeting; but this is
the effect of bachelor untidiness and indifference, not want of
means; for nothing that Doyle and Broadbent themselves have
purchased is cheap; nor is anything they want lacking. On the
walls hang a large map of South America, a pictorial
advertisement of a steamship company, an impressive portrait of
Gladstone, and several caricatures of Mr Balfour as a rabbit and
Mr Chamberlain as a fox by Francis Carruthers Gould.

At twenty minutes to five o'clock on a summer afternoon in 1904,
the room is empty. Presently the outer door is opened, and a
valet comes in laden with a large Gladstone bag, and a strap of
rugs. He carries them into the inner room. He is a respectable
valet, old enough to have lost all alacrity, and acquired an air
of putting up patiently with a great deal of trouble and
indifferent health. The luggage belongs to Broadbent, who enters
after the valet. He pulls off his overcoat and hangs it with his
hat on the stand. Then he comes to the writing table and looks
through the letters which are waiting for him. He is a robust,
full-blooded, energetic man in the prime of life, sometimes eager
and credulous, sometimes shrewd and roguish, sometimes
portentously solemn, sometimes jolly and impetuous, always
buoyant and irresistible, mostly likeable, and enormously absurd
in his most earnest moments. He bursts open his letters with his
thumb, and glances through them,