Act I

On the 15th June 1903, in the early forenoon, a medical student,
surname Redpenny, Christian name unknown and of no importance,
sits at work in a doctor's consulting-room. He devils for the
doctor by answering his letters, acting as his domestic
laboratory assistant, and making himself indispensable generally,
in return for unspecified advantages involved by intimate
intercourse with a leader of his profession, and amounting to an
informal apprenticeship and a temporary affiliation. Redpenny is
not proud, and will do anything he is asked without reservation
of his personal dignity if he is asked in a fellow-creaturely
way. He is a wide-open-eyed, ready, credulous, friendly, hasty
youth, with his hair and clothes in reluctant transition from the
untidy boy to the tidy doctor.

Redpenny is interrupted by the entrance of an old serving-woman
who has never known the cares, the preoccupations, the
responsibilities, jealousies, and anxieties of personal beauty.
She has the complexion of a never-washed gypsy, incurable by any
detergent; and she has, not a regular beard and moustaches, which
could at least be trimmed and waxed into a masculine
presentableness, but a whole crop of small beards and moustaches,
mostly springing from moles all over her face. She carries a
duster and toddles about meddlesomely, spying out dust so
diligently that whilst she is flicking off one speck she is
already looking elsewhere for another. In conversation she has
the same trick, hardly ever looking at the person she is
addressing except when she is excited. She has only one manner,
and that is the manner of an old family nurse to a child just
after it has learnt to walk. She has used her ugliness to secure
indulgences unattainable by Cleopatra or Fair Rosamund, and has
the further great advantage over them that age increases her
qualification instead of impairing it. Being an industrious,
agreeable, and popular old soul, she is a walking sermon on the
vanity of feminine prettiness. Just as Redpenny has no discovered
Christian name, she has no discovered surname, and is known
throughout the doctors' quarter between Cavendish Square and the
Marylebone Road simply as Emmy.

The consulting-room has two windows looking on Queen Anne Street.
Between the two is a marble-topped console, with haunched gilt
legs ending in sphinx claws. The huge pier-glass which surmounts
it is mostly disabled from reflection by elaborate painting on
its surface of palms, ferns, lilies, tulips, and sunflowers. The
adjoining wall contains the fireplace, with two arm-chairs before
it. As we happen to face the corner we see nothing of the other
two walls. On the right of the fireplace, or rather on the right
of any person facing the