Act I

Roebuck Ramsden is in his study, opening the morning letters. The study,
handsomely and solidly furnished, proclaims the man of means. Not
a speck of dust is visible: it is clear that there are at least two
housemaids and a parlormaid downstairs, and a housekeeper upstairs who
does not let them spare elbow-grease. Even the top of Roebuck's head is
polished: on a sunshiny day he could heliograph his orders to distant
camps by merely nodding. In no other respect, however, does he suggest
the military man. It is in active civil life that men get his broad air
of importance, his dignified expectation of deference, his determinate
mouth disarmed and refined since the hour of his success by the
withdrawal of opposition and the concession of comfort and precedence
and power. He is more than a highly respectable man: he is marked out
as a president of highly respectable men, a chairman among directors,
an alderman among councillors, a mayor among aldermen. Four tufts of
iron-grey hair, which will soon be as white as isinglass, and are in
other respects not at all unlike it, grow in two symmetrical pairs above
his ears and at the angles of his spreading jaws. He wears a black frock
coat, a white waistcoat (it is bright spring weather), and trousers,
neither black nor perceptibly blue, of one of those indefinitely mixed
hues which the modern clothier has produced to harmonize with the
religions of respectable men. He has not been out of doors yet to-day;
so he still wears his slippers, his boots being ready for him on the
hearthrug. Surmising that he has no valet, and seeing that he has no
secretary with a shorthand notebook and a typewriter, one meditates
on how little our great burgess domesticity has been disturbed by new
fashions and methods, or by the enterprise of the railway and hotel
companies which sell you a Saturday to Monday of life at Folkestone as a
real gentleman for two guineas, first class fares both ways included.

How old is Roebuck? The question is important on the threshold of a
drama of ideas; for under such circumstances everything depends on
whether his adolescence belonged to the sixties or to the eighties. He
was born, as a matter of fact, in 1839, and was a Unitarian and Free
Trader from his boyhood, and an Evolutionist from the publication of
the Origin of Species. Consequently he has always classed himself as an
advanced thinker and fearlessly outspoken reformer.

Sitting at his writing table, he has on his right the windows giving
on Portland Place. Through these, as through a proscenium, the curious
spectator may contemplate his profile as well as the blinds will permit.
On his left is the inner wall, with a stately bookcase, and the door
not quite in the middle, but somewhat further