TREBELL.  Why, I could go on earning useless money at the Bar ... think how nice that would be.  I could blackmail the next judgeship out of Horsham.  I think I could even smash his Disestablishment Bill ... and perhaps get into the next Liberal Cabinet and start my own all over again, with necessary modifications.  I shan’t do any such things.

FRANCES.  No one knows about you and poor Amy?

TREBELL.  Half a dozen friends.  Shall I offer to give evidence at the inquest this morning?

FRANCES. [With a little shiver.] They’ll say bad enough things about her without your blackening her good name.

      Without warning, his anger and anguish break out again.

TREBELL.  All she had ... all there is left of her!  She was a nothingness ... silly ... vain.  And I gave her this power over me!

      He is beaten, exhausted.  Now she goes to him, motherlike.

FRANCES.  My dear, listen to me for a little.  Consider that as a sorrow and put it behind you.  And think now ... whatever love there may be between us has neither hatred nor jealousy in it, has it, Henry?  Since I’m not a mistress or a friend but just the likest fellow-creature to you ... perhaps.

TREBELL. [Putting out his hand for hers.] Yes, my sister.  What I’ve wanted to feel for vague humanity has been what I should have felt for you ... if you’d ever made a single demand on me.

      She puts her arms round him; able to speak.

FRANCES.  Let’s go away somewhere ...  I’ll make demands.  I need refreshing as much as you.  My joy of life has been withered in me ... oh, for a long time now.  We must kiss the earth again ... take interest in common things, common people.  There’s so much of the world we don’t know.  There’s air to breathe everywhere.  Think of the flowers in a Tyrol valley in the early spring.  One can walk for days, not hurrying, as soon as the passes are open.  And the people are kind.  There’s Italy ... there’s Russia full of simple folk.  When we’ve learned to be friends with them we shall both feel so much better.

TREBELL. [Shaking his head, unmoved.] My dear sister ...  I should be bored to death.  The life contemplative and peripatetic would literally bore me into a living death.

FRANCES. [Letting it be a fairy tale.] Is your mother the Wide World nothing to you?  Can’t you open your heart like a child again?

TREBELL.  No, neither to the beauty of Nature nor the particular human animals that are always called a part of it.  I don’t even see them with your eyes.  I’m a son of the anger of Man at men’s foolishness, and unless I’ve that to feed upon...! [Now he looks at her, as if for the first time wanting to explain himself, and his voice changes.] Don’t you know that when a man cuts himself shaving, he swears?  When he loses a seat in the Cabinet he turns inward for comfort ... and if he only finds there a spirit which should have been born, but is dead ... what’s to be done then?