_Constance_
might condemn hers, but it never had a chance with a girl like that.
For myself it was not her viciousness that worried me, it was her
vulgarity; and of this she seemed quite unconscious. Her speech abounded in
second-rate colloquialisms. Was it her environment that taught her to say
dreadful things like "Put that in your pipe and smoke it"? The cheap fun
that she got out of a girl-friend who had made it a rule to pray for
her was the kind of thing you would be sorry to find in a common
boarding-school. And are gentlefolk in the habit of asking a man, as
_Constance_ did, how it was that he ever came to get engaged to such a
woman as the one of his choice? In Bayswater it simply isn't done.
At the end of the First Act, after many trivialities and the waste of
precious time over a description of certain characters that were presently
to appear and endorse it, there was a sudden diversion. The professional
card of a private detective was discovered in an arm-chair. No one seemed
to know how it got there, and, as the curtain chose this moment to fall, we
were left in a state of palpitation, wondering how we were to get through
the interval with our curiosity unappeased.
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