Sorin. [Smoothing his beard] They are the tragedy of my existence.  Even when I was young I always looked as if I were drunk, and all.  Women have never liked me. [Sitting down] Why is my sister out of temper?

TREPLIEFF.  Why?  Because she is jealous and bored. [Sitting down beside Sorin] She is not acting this evening, but Nina is, and so she has set herself against me, and against the performance of the play, and against the play itself, which she hates without ever having read it.

Sorin. [Laughing] Does she, really?

TREPLIEFF.  Yes, she is furious because Nina is going to have a success on this little stage. [Looking at his watch] My mother is a psychological curiosity.  Without doubt brilliant and talented, capable of sobbing over a novel, of reciting all Nekrasoff’s poetry by heart, and of nursing the sick like an angel of heaven, you should see what happens if any one begins praising Duse to her!  She alone must be praised and written about, raved over, her marvellous acting in “La Dame aux Camelias” extolled to the skies.  As she cannot get all that rubbish in the country, she grows peevish and cross, and thinks we are all against her, and to blame for it all.  She is superstitious, too.  She dreads burning three candles, and fears the thirteenth day of the month.  Then she is stingy.  I know for a fact that she has seventy thousand roubles in a bank at Odessa, but she is ready to burst into tears if you ask her to lend you a penny.

Sorin.  You have taken it into your head that your mother dislikes your play, and the thought of it has excited you, and all.  Keep calm; your mother adores you.

TREPLIEFF. [Pulling a flower to pieces] She loves me, loves me not; loves—­loves me not; loves—­loves me not! [Laughing] You see, she doesn’t love me, and why should she?  She likes life and love and gay clothes, and I am already twenty-five years old; a sufficient reminder to her that she is no longer young.  When I am away she is only thirty-two, in my presence she is forty-three, and she hates me for it.  She knows, too, that I despise the modern stage.  She adores it, and imagines that she is working on it for the benefit of humanity and her sacred art, but to me the theatre is merely the vehicle of convention and prejudice.  When the curtain rises on that little three-walled room, when those mighty geniuses, those high-priests of art, show us people in the act of eating, drinking, loving, walking, and wearing their coats, and attempt to extract a moral from their insipid talk; when playwrights give us under a thousand different guises the same, same, same old stuff, then I must needs run from it, as Maupassant ran from the Eiffel Tower that was about to crush him by its vulgarity.

Sorin.  But we can’t do without a theatre.