The Philanderer | Page 9

from Julia.) Don't cry, Julia.
CUTHBERTSON (huskily). I hope you may long be spared, Dan.

CRAVEN. To oblige me, Jo, change the subject. (He gets up and again
posts himself on the hearthrug with his back to the fire.)
CHARTERIS. Try and persuade him to join our club, Cuthbertson. He
mopes.
JULIA. It's no use. Sylvia and I are always at him to join; but he won't.
CRAVEN. My child, I have my own club.
CHARTERIS (contemptuously). Yes, the Junior Army and Navy! Do
you call that a club? Why, they daren't let a woman cross the doorstep!
CRAVEN (a little ruffled). Clubs are a matter of taste, Charteris. You
like a cock and hen club: I don't. It's bad enough to have Julia and her
sister--a girl under twenty--spending half their time at such a place.
Besides, now really, such a name for a club! The Ibsen club! I should
be laughed out of London. The Ibsen club! Come, Cuthbertson, back
me up. I'm sure you agree with me.
CHARTERIS. Cuthbertson's a member.
CRAVEN (amazed). No! Why, he's been talking to me all the evening
about the way in which everything is going to the dogs through
advanced ideas in the younger generation.
CHARTERIS. Of course. He's been studying it in the club. He's always
there.
CUTHBERTSON (warmly). Not always. Don't exaggerate, Charteris.
You know very well that though I joined the club on Grace's account,
thinking that her father's presence there would be a protection and a--a
sort of sanction, as it were--I never approved of it.
CRAVEN (tactlessly harping on Cuthbertson's inconsistency). Well,
you know, this is unexpected: now it's really very unexpected. I should
never have thought it from hearing you talk, Jo. Why, you said the
whole modern movement was abhorrent to you because your life had

been passed in witnessing scenes of suffering nobly endured and
sacrifice willingly rendered by womanly women and manly men and
deuce knows what else. Is it at the Ibsen club that you see all this
manliness and womanliness?
CHARTERIS. Certainly not: the rules of the club forbid anything of
that sort. Every candidate for membership must be nominated by a man
and a woman, who both guarantee that the candidate, if female, is not
womanly, and if male, is not manly.
CRAVEN (chuckling cunningly and stooping to press his heated
trousers against his legs, which are chilly). Won't do, Charteris. Can't
take me in with so thin a story as that.
CUTHBERTSON (vehemently). It's true. It's monstrous, but it's true.
CRAVEN (with rising indignation, as he begins to draw the inevitable
inferences). Do you mean to say that somebody had the audacity to
guarantee that my Julia is not a womanly woman?
CHARTERIS (darkly). It sounds incredible; but a man was found ready
to take that inconceivable lie on his conscience.
JULIA (firing up). If he has nothing worse than that on his conscience,
he may sleep pretty well. In what way am I more womanly than any of
the rest of them, I should like to know? They are always saying things
like that behind my back--I hear of them from Sylvia. Only the other
day a member of the committee said I ought never to have been
elected--that you (to Charteris) had smuggled me in. I should like to see
her say it to my face: that's all.
CRAVEN. But, my precious, I most sincerely hope she was right. She
paid you the highest compliment. Why, the place must be a den of
infamy.
CUTHBERTSON (emphatically). So it is, Craven, so it is.
CHARTERIS. Exactly. That's what keeps it so select: nobody but

people whose reputations are above suspicion dare belong to it. If we
once got a good name, we should become a mere whitewashing shop
for all the shady characters in London. Better join us, Craven. Let me
put you up.
CRAVEN. What! Join a club where there's some scoundrel who
guaranteed my daughter to be an unwomanly woman! If I weren't an
invalid, I'd kick him.
CHARTERIS. Oh don't say that. It was I who did it.
CRAVEN (reproachfully). You! Now upon my soul, Charteris, this is
very vexing. Now how could you bring yourself to do such a thing?
CHARTERIS. She made me. Why, I had to guarantee Cuthbertson as
unmanly; and he's the leading representative of manly sentiment in
London.
CRAVEN. That didn't do Jo any harm: but it took away my Julia's
character.
JULIA (outraged). Daddy!
CHARTERIS. Not at the Ibsen club, quite the contrary. After all, what
can we do? You know what breaks up most clubs for men and women.
There's a quarrel--a scandal--cherchez la femme--always a woman at
the bottom of it. Well, we knew this when we founded the club; but we
noticed that the woman at the bottom