WEDGECROFT. [Scolding him.] Nonsense ... you’ve the instinct to preserve your life as everyone else has ... and I’m here to show you how.

TREBELL. [Beyond the reach of his kindness.] I assure you that these two days while you’ve been fussing around O’Connell—­bless your kind heart—­I’ve been waiting events, indifferent enough to understand his indifference.

WEDGECROFT.  Not indifferent.

TREBELL.  Lifeless enough already, then. [Suddenly a thought strikes him.]
D’you think it was Horsham and his little committee persuaded O’Connell?

WEDGECROFT.  On the contrary.

TREBELL.  So you need not have let them into the secret?

WEDGECROFT.  No.

TREBELL.  Think of that.

      He almost laughs; but WEDGECROFT goes on quite innocently.

WEDGECROFT.  Yes ...  I’m sorry.

TREBELL.  Upsetting their moral digestion for nothing.

WEDGECROFT.  But when O’Connell wouldn’t listen to us we had to rope in the important people.

TREBELL.  With their united wisdom. [Then he breaks away again into great bitterness.] No ... what do they make of this woman’s death?  I saw them in that room, Gilbert, like men seen through the wrong end of a telescope.  D’you think if the little affair with Nature ... her offence and mine against the conveniences of civilization ... had ended in my death too ... then they’d have stopped to wonder at the misuse and waste of the only force there is in the world ... come to think of it, there is no other ... than this desire for expression ... in words ... or through children.  Would they have thought of that and stopped whispering about the scandal?

      Through this WEDGECROFT has watched him very gravely.

WEDGECROFT.  Trebell ... if the inquest to-morrow had put you out of action ...

TREBELL.  Should I have grown a beard and travelled abroad and after ten years timidly tried to climb my way back into politics?  When public opinion takes its heel from your face it keeps it for your finger-tips.  After twenty years to be forgiven by your more broad-minded friends and tolerated as a dotard by a new generation....

WEDGECROFT.  Nonsense.  What age are you now ... forty-six ... forty-seven?

TREBELL.  Well ... let’s instance a good man.  Gladstone had done his best work by sixty-five.  Then he began to be popular.  Think of his last years of oratory.

      He has gone to his table and now very methodically starts to tidy his
      papers, WEDGECROFT still watching him.

WEDGECROFT.  You’d have had to thank Heaven for a little that there were more lives than one to lead.

TREBELL.  That’s another of your faults, Gilbert ... it’s a comfort just now to enumerate them.  You’re an anarchist ... a kingdom to yourself.  You make little treaties with Truth and with Beauty, and what can disturb you?  I’m a part of the machine I believe in.  If my life as I’ve made it is to be cut short ... the rest of me shall walk out of the world and slam the door ... with the noise of a pistol shot.