Bernard Shaw

“ MARCHBANKS (looking round him) . Is it like this for her here always? A woman, with a great soul, craving for reality, truth, freedom, and being fed on metaphors, sermons, stale perorations, mere rhetoric. Do you think a woman's soul can live on your talent for preaching?
MORELL (Stung) . Marchbanks: you make it hard for me to control myself. My talent is like yours insofar as it has any real worth at all. It is the gift of finding words for divine truth. ”

“ CANDIDA. But why, James?
MORELL (almost fiercely) . Because I don't choose. These people forget that I am a man: they think I am a talking machine to be turned on for their pleasure every evening of my life. May I not have ONE night at home, with my wife, and my friends?
(They are all amazed at this outburst, except Eugene. His expression remains unchanged.)
CANDIDA. Oh, James, you know you'll have an attack of bad conscience to-morrow; and I shall have to suffer for that.
LEXY (intimidated, but urgent) . I know, of course, that they make the most unreasonable demands on you. ”

“ CANDIDA (retreating, chilled) . I beg your pardon, James; I did not mean to touch you. I am waiting to hear your bid.
MORELL (with proud humility) . I have nothing to offer you but my strength for your defence, my honesty of purpose for your surety, my ability and industry for your livelihood, and my authority and position for your dignity. That is all it becomes a man to offer to a woman.
CANDIDA (quite quietly) . And you, Eugene? What do you offer?
MARCHBANKS. My weakness! my desolation! my heart's need!
CANDIDA (impressed) . That's a good bid, Eugene. ”

“ MORELL. Some fiddlestick. Oh, if she is mad enough to leave me for you, who will protect her? Who will help her? who will work for her? who will be a father to her children? (He sits down distractedly on the sofa, with his elbows on his knees and his head propped on his clenched fists.)
MARCHBANKS (snapping his fingers wildly) . She does not ask those silly questions. It is she who wants somebody to protect, to help, to work for—somebody to give her children to protect, to help and to work for. ”

“ CANDIDA. When I am thirty, she will be forty-five. When I am sixty, she will be seventy-five.
MARCHBANKS (turning to her) . In a hundred years, we shall be the same age. But I have a better secret than that in my heart. Let me go now. The night outside grows impatient.
CANDIDA. Good-bye. (She takes his face in her hands; and as he divines her intention and bends his knee, she kisses his forehead. Then he flies out into the night. She turns to Morell, holding out her arms to him.) Ah, James! (They embrace. But they do not know the secret in the poet's heart.) ”

“ And you think it's all enthusiasm for the kingdom of Heaven on earth; and so do they. You dear silly!
MORELL. Candida: what dreadful, what soul-destroying cynicism! Are you jesting? Or—can it be?—are you jealous?
CANDIDA (with curious thoughtfulness) . Yes, I feel a little jealous sometimes.
MORELL (incredulously) . What! Of Prossy?
CANDIDA (laughing) . No, no, no, no. Not jealous of anybody. Jealous for somebody else, who is not loved as he ought to be.
MORELL. Me!
CANDIDA. You! Why, you're spoiled with love and worship: you get far more than is good for you. No: I mean Eugene. ”

“ Morell comes back with Eugene, whom Burgess contemplates moist-eyed with enthusiasm. He is a strange, shy youth of eighteen, slight, effeminate, with a delicate childish voice, and a hunted, tormented expression and shrinking manner that show the painful sensitiveness that very swift and acute apprehensiveness produces in youth, before the character has grown to its full strength. ”

“ MORELL (harshly) . And where there is nothing to do but to be idle, selfish and useless.
CANDIDA (jarred) . Oh, James, how could you spoil it all!
MARCHBANKS (firing up) . Yes, to be idle, selfish and useless: that is to be beautiful and free and happy: hasn't every man desired that with all his soul for the woman he loves? That's my ideal: what's yours, and that of all the dreadful people who live in these hideous rows of houses? Sermons and scrubbing brushes! With you to preach the sermon and your wife to scrub.
CANDIDA (quaintly) . He cleans the boots, Eugene. ”

“ Ask Prossy and Maria how troublesome the house is even when we have no visitors to help us to slice the onions. Ask the tradesmen who want to worry James and spoil his beautiful sermons who it is that puts them off. When there is money to give, he gives it: when there is money to refuse, I refuse it. I build a castle of comfort and indulgence and love for him, and stand sentinel always to keep little vulgar cares out. I make him master here, though he does not know it, and could not tell you a moment ago how it came to be so. ”

“ He is a first rate clergyman, able to say what he likes to whom he likes, to lecture people without setting himself up against them, to impose his authority on them without humiliating them, and to interfere in their business without impertinence. His well-spring of spiritual enthusiasm and sympathetic emotion has never run dry for a moment: he still eats and sleeps heartily enough to win the daily battle between exhaustion and recuperation triumphantly. ”

“ MORELL (rising from his knee, alarmed) . Candida: don't let him do anything rash.
CANDIDA (confident, smiling at Eugene) . Oh, there is no fear. He has learnt to live without happiness.
MARCHBANKS. I no longer desire happiness: life is nobler than that. Parson James: I give you my happiness with both hands: I love you because you have filled the heart of the woman I loved. Good-bye. (He goes towards the door.)
CANDIDA. One last word. (He stops, but without turning to her.) How old are you, Eugene?
MARCHBANKS. As old as the world now. ”

“ We need such help, Marchbanks: we need it greatly and always. There are so many things to make us doubt, if once we let our understanding be troubled. Even at home, we sit as if in camp, encompassed by a hostile army of doubts. ”

“ Eugene, my boy: you are making a fool of yourself—a very great fool of yourself. There's a piece of wholesome plain speaking for you.
MARCHBANKS. Oh, do you think I don't know all that? Do you think that the things people make fools of themselves about are any less real and true than the things they behave sensibly about? (Morell's gaze wavers for the first time. He instinctively averts his face and stands listening, startled and thoughtful.) They are more true: they are the only things that are true. ”

“ BURGESS (with grave disapproval) . Don't you keep a servant now, James?
MORELL. Yes; but she isn't a slave; and the house looks as if I kept three. That means that everyone has to lend a hand. It's not a bad plan: Prossy and I can talk business after breakfast whilst we're washing up. Washing up's no trouble when there are two people to do it.
MARCHBANKS (tormentedly) . Do you think every woman is as coarse-grained as Miss Garnett?
BURGESS (emphatically) . That's quite right, Mr. Morchbanks. That's quite right. She IS corse-grained.
MORELL (quietly and significantly) . Marchbanks! ”

“ PROSERPINE (amazed, but keeping her wits about her—her point of honor in encounters with strange young men) . Wicked people get over that shyness occasionally, don't they?
MARCHBANKS (scrambling up almost fiercely) . Wicked people means people who have no love: therefore they have no shame. They have the power to ask love because they don't need it: they have the power to offer it because they have none to give. (He collapses into his seat, and adds, mournfully) But we, who have love, and long to mingle it with the love of others: we cannot utter a word. ”

“ LEXY. What a good man! What a thorough, loving soul he is! (He takes Morell's place at the table, making himself very comfortable as he takes out a cigaret.)
PROSERPINE (impatiently, pulling the letter she has been working at off the typewriter and folding it.) Oh, a man ought to be able to be fond of his wife without making a fool of himself about her.
LEXY (shocked) . Oh, Miss Prossy!
PROSERPINE (rising busily and coming to the stationery case to get an envelope, in which she encloses the letter as she speaks) . Candida here, and Candida there, and Candida everywhere! ”