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front of the fireplace. He is evidently in a state of great mental excitement and distress. As the scene progresses he paces nervously up and down the room.]
    LORD GORING. My dear Robert, it’s a very awkward business, very awkward indeed. You should have told your wife the whole thing. Secrets from other people’s wives are a necessary luxury in modern life. So, at least, I am always told at the club by people who are bald enough to know better. But no man should have a secret from his own wife. She invariably finds it out. Women have a wonderful instinct about things. They can discover everything except the obvious.
    SIR ROBERT CHILTERN. Arthur, I couldn’t tell my wife. When could I have told her? Not last night. It would have made a life-long separation between us, and I would have lost the love of the one woman in the world I worship, of the only woman who has ever stirred love within me. Last night it would have been quite impossible. She would have turned from me in horror . . . in horror and in contempt.
    LORD GORING. Is Lady Chiltern as perfect as all that?
    SIR ROBERT CHILTERN. Yes; my wife is as perfect as all that.
    LORD GORING. [Taking off his left-hand glove.] What a pity! I beg your pardon, my dear fellow, I didn’t quite mean that. But if what you tell me is true, I should like to have a serious talk about life with Lady Chiltern.
    SIR ROBERT CHILTERN. It would be quite useless.
    LORD GORING. May I try?
    SIR ROBERT CHILTERN. Yes; but nothing could make her alter her views.
    LORD GORING. Well, at the worst it would simply be a psychological experiment.
    SIR ROBERT CHILTERN. All such experiments are terribly dangerous.
    LORD GORING. Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn’t so, life wouldn’t be worth living. . . . Well, I am bound to say that I think you should have told her years ago.
    SIR ROBERT CHILTERN. When? When we were engaged? Do you think she would have married me if she had known that the origin of my fortune is such as it is, the basis of my career such as it is, and that I had done a thing that I suppose most men would call shameful and dishonourable?
    LORD GORING. [Slowly.] Yes; most men would call it ugly names. There is no doubt of that.
    SIR ROBERT CHILTERN. [Bitterly.] Men who every day do something of the same kind themselves. Men who, each one of them, have worse secrets in their own lives.
    LORD GORING. That is the reason they are so pleased to find out other people’s secrets. It distracts public attention from their own.
    SIR ROBERT CHILTERN. And, after all, whom did I wrong by what I did? No one.
    LORD GORING. [Looking at him steadily.] Except yourself, Robert.
    SIR ROBERT CHILTERN. [After a pause.] Of course I had private information about a certain transaction contemplated by the Government of the day, and I acted on it. Private information is practically the source of every large modern fortune.
    LORD GORING. [Tapping his boot with his cane.] And public scandal invariably the result.
    SIR ROBERT CHILTERN. [Pacing up and down the room.] Arthur, do you think that what I did nearly eighteen years ago should be brought up against me now? Do you think it fair that a man’s whole career should be ruined for a fault done in one’s boyhood almost? I was twenty-two at the time, and I had the double misfortune of being well-born and poor, two unforgiveable things nowadays. Is it fair that the folly, the sin of one’s youth, if men choose to call it a sin, should wreck a life like mine, should place me in the pillory, should shatter all that I have worked for, all that I have built up. Is it fair, Arthur?
    LORD GORING. Life is never fair, Robert. And perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.
    SIR ROBERT CHILTERN. Every man of ambition has to fight his century with its own weapons. What this century worships is wealth. The God of this century is wealth. To succeed one must have wealth. At all costs one must have wealth.
    LORD