The orderly (To Mitchener).  Would you mind lendin me a and,
Guvner?

Lady Corinthia (raising her revolver).  I shall be obliged to shoot you if you stir, General.

Mrs. Banger (To the Orderly).  When you are ordered to put a person out you should do it like this. (She hurls him from the room.  He is heard falling headlong downstairs and crashing through a glass door.) I shall now wait on General Sandstone.  If he shows any sign of weakness, he shall share that poor wretch’s fate. (She goes out.)

Lady Corinthia.  Isnt she magnificent?

Mitchener.  Thank heaven shes gone.  And now, my dear lady, is it necessary to keep that loaded pistol to my nose all through our conversation?

Lady Corinthia.  Its not loaded.  Its heavy enough, goodness knows, without putting bullets in it.

Mitchener (triumphantly snatching his revolver from the drawer).  Then I am master of the situation.  This is loaded.  Ha, ha!

Lady Corinthia.  But since we are not really going to shoot one another, what difference can it possibly make?

Mitchener (putting his pistol down on the table).  True.  Quite true.  I recognize there the practical good sense that has prevented you from falling into the snares of the Suffragets.

Lady Corinthia.  The Suffragets, General, are the dupes of dowdies.  A really attractive and clever woman—­

Mitchener (gallantly).  Yourself, for instance.

Lady Corinthia (snatching up his revolver).  Another step and you are a dead man.

Mitchener (amazed).  My dear lady!

Lady Corinthia.  I am not your dear lady.  You are not the first man who has concluded that because I am devoted to music and can reach F flat with the greatest facility—­Patti never got above E flat—­I am marked out as the prey of every libertine.  You think I am like the thousands of weak women whom you have ruined—­

Mitchener.  I solemnly protest—­

Lady Corinthia.  Oh, I know what you officers are.  To you a woman’s honor is nothing, and the idle pleasure of the moment is everything.

Mitchener.  This is perfectly ridiculous.  I never ruined anyone in my life.

Lady Corinthia.  Never!  Are you in earnest?

Mitchener.  Certainly I am in earnest.  Most indignantly in earnest.

Lady Corinthia (throwing down the pistol contemptuously).  Then you have no temperament; you are not an artist.  You have no soul for music.

Mitchener.  Ive subscribed to the regimental band all my life.  I bought two sarrusophones for it out of my own pocket.  When I sang Tosti’s Goodbye for Ever at Knightsbridge in 1880, the whole regiment wept.  You are too young to remember that.