GLADSTONE.  I am sorry.  I won’t do it again.

MRS. G. Ah! so you say!  Poor Mr. Morley will have to wait now.  I had promised him this.  There!

(Making him sit down, she puts the comforter round his neck, and gives him a parting kiss.)

And now I’m going.

GLADSTONE.  Go, my love!  I will come presently.

(But he has not quite got rid of her.  Her hands are now reaching down to the back of the sofa behind him.)

What are you looking for?

MRS. G. My knitting-needles.  You are sitting on them.  Now mind, you are not to sit up!

GLADSTONE.  I won’t sit up long.

(Quietly and serenely she goes to the door, looks back for a moment, then glides through it, leaving behind a much-deceived husband, who will not hear the sound of her solitary weeping, or see any signs of it on her face when presently he comes to read Herrick at her bedside.)

(For a while he sits silent, peacefully encompassed in the thoughts with which she has provided him; then very slowly he speaks.)

GLADSTONE.  Well, if it pleases her—­I suppose it must be right!

CURTAIN

Possession

Dramatis Personae

JULIA ROBINSON Sisters
LAURA JAMES Sisters
MARTHA ROBINSON Sisters
SUSAN ROBINSON Their Mother
THOMAS ROBINSON Their Father
WILLIAM JAMES Husband to Laura James
HANNAH The family servant

Part Two

The Everlasting Habitations

“All hope abandon ye who enter here.”

“Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness; that, when ye jail, they may receive you into everlasting habitations”

Possession

A Peep-Show in Paradise

SCENE.—­The Everlasting Habitations

It is evening (or so it seems), and to the comfortably furnished Victorian drawing-room a middle-aged maid-servant in cap and apron brings a lamp, and proceeds to draw blinds and close curtains.  To do this she passes the fire-place, where before a pleasantly bright hearth sits, comfortably sedate, an elderly lady whose countenance and attitude suggest the very acme of genteel repose.  She is a handsome woman, very conscious of herself, but carrying the burden of her importance with an ease which, in her own mind, leaves nothing to be desired.  The once-striking outline of her features has been rounded by good feeding to a softness which is merely physical; and her voice, when she speaks, has a calculated gentleness very caressing to her own ear, and a little irritating to others who are not of an inferior class.  Menials like it, however.  The room, though over-upholstered,