Act I

In a dentist's operating room on a fine August morning in 1896. Not
the usual tiny London den, but the best sitting room of a furnished
lodging in a terrace on the sea front at a fashionable watering place.
The operating chair, with a gas pump and cylinder beside it, is half way
between the centre of the room and one of the corners. If you look into
the room through the window which lights it, you will see the fireplace
in the middle of the wall opposite you, with the door beside it to your
left; an M.R.C.S. diploma in a frame hung on the chimneypiece; an easy
chair covered in black leather on the hearth; a neat stool and bench,
with vice, tools, and a mortar and pestle in the corner to the right.
Near this bench stands a slender machine like a whip provided with a
stand, a pedal, and an exaggerated winch. Recognising this as a dental
drill, you shudder and look away to your left, where you can see another
window, underneath which stands a writing table, with a blotter and a
diary on it, and a chair. Next the writing table, towards the door, is a
leather covered sofa. The opposite wall, close on your right, is
occupied mostly by a bookcase. The operating chair is under your nose,
facing you, with the cabinet of instruments handy to it on your left.
You observe that the professional furniture and apparatus are new, and
that the wall paper, designed, with the taste of an undertaker, in
festoons and urns, the carpet with its symmetrical plans of rich,
cabbagy nosegays, the glass gasalier with lustres; the ornamental gilt
rimmed blue candlesticks on the ends of the mantelshelf, also glass-
draped with lustres, and the ormolu clock under a glass-cover in the
middle between them, its uselessness emphasized by a cheap American
clock disrespectfully placed beside it and now indicating 12 o'clock
noon, all combine with the black marble which gives the fireplace the
air of a miniature family vault, to suggest early Victorian commercial
respectability, belief in money, Bible fetichism, fear of hell always at
war with fear of poverty, instinctive horror of the passionate character
of art, love and Roman Catholic religion, and all the first fruits of
plutocracy in the early generations of the industrial revolution.

There is no shadow of this on the two persons who are occupying the
room just now. One of them, a very pretty woman in miniature, her tiny
figure dressed with the daintiest gaiety, is of a later generation,
being hardly eighteen yet. This darling little creature clearly does
not belong to the room, or even to the country; for her complexion,
though very delicate, has been burnt biscuit color by some warmer sun
than England's; and yet there is, for a very subtle observer, a link
between them. For she has a glass