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Byron. Septimus: Lord Byron,
if you please. Thomasina: Mama is in love with Lord Byron. Septimus: (Absorbed) Yes. Nonsense. Thomasina: It is not nonsense. I saw them together in the gazebo.
    (Septimus’s pen stops moving, he raises his eyes to her
at last.)
    Lord Byron was reading to her from his satire, and mama was
laughing, with her head in her best position. Septimus: She did not understand
the satire, and was showing politeness to a guest. Thomasina: She is vexed with
papa for his determination to alter the park, but that alone cannot account for
her politeness to a guest. She came downstairs hours before her custom. Lord
    Byron was amusing at breakfast. He paid you a tribute,
    Septimus. Septimus: Did he? Thomasina: He said you were a
witty fellow, and he had almost by heart an article you wrote about—well, I forget
what, but it concerned a book called The Maid of Turkey’ and how you would not
give it to your dog for dinner. Septimus: Ah. Mr Chater was at breakfast, of
course. Thomasina: He was, not like certain lazybones.
    Septimus: He does not have Latin to set and mathematics to
correct.
    (He takes Thomasina*s lesson book from underneath Plautus
and tosses it down the table to her.)
    Thomasina: Correct? What was incorrect in it? (She looks
into the book.) Alpha minus? Pooh! What is the minus for?
    Septimus: For doing more than was asked.
    Thomasina: You did not like my discovery?
    Septimus: A fancy is not a discovery.
    Thomasina: A gibe is not a rebuttal.
    (SEVTIMUS finishes what he is writing. He folds the pages
into a letter. He has sealing wax and the means to melt it. He seals the letter
and writes on the cover. Meanwhile— ) You are churlish with me because mama
is paying attention to your friend. Well, let them elope, they cannot turn back
the advancement of knowledge. I think it is an excellent discovery. Each week I
plot your equations dot for dot, xs against.ys in all manner of algebraical
relation, and every week they draw themselves as commonplace geometry, as if
the world of forms were nothing but arcs and angles. God’s truth, Septimus, if
there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one
like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose? Do we believe nature is
written in numbers?
    Septimus: We do.
    Thomasina: Then why do your equations only describe the
shapes of manufacture?
    Septimus: I do not know.
    Thomasina: Armed thus, God could only make a cabinet.
    Septimus: He has mastery of equations which lead into infinities
where we cannot follow.
    Thomasina: What a faint-heart! We must work outward from the
middle of the maze. We will start with something simple. (She picks up the
apple leaf.) I will plot this leaf and deduce its equation. You will be
famous for being my tutor when Lord Byron is dead and forgotten.
    (Septimus completes the business with his letter. He puts
the letter in his pocket.)
    Septimus: (Firmly) Back to Cleopatra.
    Thomasina: Is it Cleopatra?—1 hate Cleopatra!
    Septimus: You hate her? Why?
    Thomasina: Everything is turned to love with her. New love,
absent love, lost love—1 never knew a heroine that makes such noodles of our
sex. It only needs a Roman general to drop anchor outside the window and away
goes the empire like a christening mug into a pawn shop. If Queen Elizabeth had
been a Ptolemy history would have been quite different—we would be admiring the
pyramids of Rome and the great Sphinx of Verona.
    Septimus: God save us.
    Thomasina: But instead, the Egyptian noodle made carnal embrace
with the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a
fine for all that is overdue. Oh, Septimus!—can you bear it? All the lost plays
of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides—thousands
of poems—Aristotle’s own library brought to Egypt by the noodle’s ancestors!
How can we sleep for grief?
    Septimus: By counting our stock. Seven plays from Aeschylus,
seven from Sopocles, nineteen from