BURGE-LUBIN [_injured_] Really, Mrs Lutestring! You speak as if I were a
notoriously indiscreet person. Barnabas: have I such a reputation?
BARNABAS [_resignedly_] It cant be helped. It's constitutional.
CONFUCIUS. It is utterly unconstitutional. But, as you say, it cannot be
helped.
BURGE-LUBIN [_solemnly_] I deny that a secret of State has ever passed
my lips--except perhaps to the Minister of Health, who is discretion
personified. People think, because she is a negress--
MRS LUTESTRING. It does not matter much now. Once, it would have
mattered a great deal. But my children are all dead.
THE ARCHBISHOP. Yes: the children must have been a terrible difficulty.
Fortunately for me, I had none.
MRS LUTESTRING. There was one daughter who was the child of my very
heart. Some years after my first drowning I learnt that she had lost her
sight. I went to her. She was an old woman of ninety-six, blind. She
asked me to sit and talk with her because my voice was like the voice of
her dead mother.
BURGE-LUBIN. The complications must be frightful.
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