QUEEN.  Pick up that broken glass.

(The Attendant collects it on the hand-tray which he carries)

Bring it to me! ...  Leave it!

(The Attendant deposits the tray before her, and GOES. Gently the Queen handles the broken pieces.  Then in a voice of tearful emotion she speaks.)

Such devotion!  Most extraordinary!  Oh!  Albert!  Albert!

(And in the sixteenth year of her widowhood and the fortieth of her reign the Royal Lady bends her head over the fragments of broken glass, and weeps happy tears.)

CURTAIN

His Favourite Flower

Dramatis Personae

THE STATESMAN
THE HOUSEKEEPER
THE DOCTOR
THE PRIMROSES

His Favourite Flower

A Political Myth Explained

The eminent old Statesman has not been at all well.  He is sitting up in his room, and his doctor has come to see him for the third time in three days.  This means that the malady is not yet seriously regarded:  once a day is still sufficient.  Nevertheless, he is a woeful wreck to look at; and the doctor looks at him with the greatest respect, and listens to his querulous plaint patiently.  For that great dome of silence, his brain, repository of so many state-secrets, is still a redoubtable instrument:  its wit and its magician’s cunning have not yet lapsed into the dull inane of senile decay.  Though fallen from power, after a bad beating at the polls, there is no knowing but that he may rise again, and hold once more in those tired old hands, shiny with rheumatic gout, and now twitching feebly under the discomfort of a superimposed malady, the reins of democratic and imperial power.  The dark, cavernous eyes still wear their look of accumulated wisdom, a touch also of visionary fire.  The sparse locks, dyed to a raven black, set off with their uncanny sheen the clay-like pallor of the face.  He sits in a high-backed chair, wrapped in an oriental dressing-gown, his muffled feet resting on a large hot-water bottle; and the eminent physician, preparatory to taking a seat at his side, bends solicitously over him.

DOCTOR.  Well, my dear lord, how are you to-day?  Better?  You look better.

STATESMAN.  Yes, I suppose I am better.  But my sleep isn’t what it ought to be.  I have had a dream, Doctor; and it has upset me.

DOCTOR.  A dream?

STATESMAN.  You wonder that I should mention it?  Of course, I—­I don’t believe in dreams.  Yet they indicate, sometimes—­do they not?-certain disorders of the mind.

DOCTOR.  Generally of the stomach.

STATESMAN.  Ah!  The same thing, Doctor.  There’s no getting away from that in one’s old age; when one has lived as well as I have.

DOCTOR.  That is why I dieted you.