“It is Rooshan; ain’t it, Wegg?”

“No, sir.  Roman.  Roman.”

“What’s the difference, Wegg?”

“The difference, sir?” Mr Wegg was faltering and in danger of breaking down, when a bright thought flashed upon him.  “The difference, sir?  There you place me in a difficulty, Mr Boffin.  Suffice it to observe, that the difference is best postponed to some other occasion when Mrs Boffin does not honor us with her company.  In Mrs Boffin’s presence, sir, we had better drop it.”

Mr Wegg thus came out of his disadvantage with quite a chivalrous air, and not only that, but by dint of repeating with a manly delicacy, “In Mrs Boffin’s presence, sir, we had better drop it!” turned the disadvantage on Boffin, who felt that he had committed himself in a very painful manner.

I am willing to let Mr Wegg drop it on these terms, provided I am allowed to mention here that Mrs Warren’s Profession is a play for women; that it was written for women; that it has been performed and produced mainly through the determination of women that it should be performed and produced; that the enthusiasm of women made its first performance excitingly successful; and that not one of these women had any inducement to support it except their belief in the timeliness and the power of the lesson the play teaches.  Those who were “surprised to see ladies present” were men; and when they proceeded to explain that the journals they represented could not possibly demoralize the public by describing such a play, their editors cruelly devoted the space saved by their delicacy to an elaborate and respectful account of the progress of a young lord’s attempt to break the bank at Monte Carlo.  A few days sooner Mrs Warren would have been crowded out of their papers by an exceptionally abominable police case.  I do not suggest that the police case should have been suppressed; but neither do I believe that regard for public morality had anything to do with their failure to grapple with the performance by the Stage Society.  And, after all, there was no need to fall back on Silas Wegg’s subterfuge.  Several critics saved the faces of their papers easily enough by the simple expedient of saying all they had to say in the tone of a shocked governess lecturing a naughty child.  To them I might plead, in Mrs Warren’s words, “Well, it’s only good manners to be ashamed, dearie;” but it surprises me, recollecting as I do the effect produced by Miss Fanny Brough’s delivery of that line, that gentlemen who shivered like violets in a zephyr as it swept through them, should so completely miss the full width of its application as to go home and straightway make a public exhibition of mock modesty.