The doyen of the Tyrrell family is a young and perhaps too cultured literary man with rather long, dark brown hair, a face well cut and sensitive, if a trifle weak about the lower jaw, and a voice whose exquisite modulations could only be the product of education at one of the two Great Universities. We will call him plain Aston. Miss Topsy, the head of the Garrick family, is a young woman of not quite twenty, with sleek, yellow hair hanging, like a page's, short and thick about her ears; boyish, too, in her slenderness and length of leg--boyish, but feminine and attractive to the last degree. Miss Topsy paints charmingly, sings in a small, pure voice that twists the heart and makes the bowels yearn in the hearing of it, is well educated, and has read, or at least heard of, most of the best books in three languages, knows something, too, of economics and the doctrines of Freud. They enter arm in arm, fresh from the dance, trailing behind them with their disengaged hands two absurd ventriloquist's dummies of themselves. They sit down on a bench placed in the middle of the stage under a kind of arbour festooned with fabulous flowers. The other members of the two families lurk in the tropical twilight of the background. Aston advances his dummy and makes it speak, moving its mouth and limbs appropriately by means of the secret levers which his hand controls. ASTON'S DUMMY. What a perfect floor it is to-night! TOPSY'S DUMMY. Yes, it's like ice, isn't it? And such a good band. ASTON'S DUMMY. Oh yes, a very good band. TOPSY'S DUMMY. They play at dinner-time at the Necropole, you know. ASTON'S DUMMY. Really! (_A long, uncomfortable silence._) (_From under a lofty twangum tree emerges the figure of CAIN WASHINGTON TYRRELL, ASTON'S negro brother--for the TYRRELLS, I regret to say, have a lick of the tar-brush in them and CAIN is a Mendelian throwback to the pure Jamaican type. CAIN is stout and his black face shines with grease. The whites of his eyes are like enamel, his smile is chryselephantine. He is dressed in faultless evening dress and a ribbon of seals tinkles on his stomach. He walks with legs wide apart, the upper part of his body thrown back and his belly projecting, as though he were supporting the weight of an Aristophanic actor's costume. He struts up and down in front of the couple on the seat, grinning and slapping himself on the waistcoat._) CAIN. What hair, nyum nyum! and the nape of her neck; and her body--how slender! and what lovely movements, nyum nyum! (_Approaching ASTON and speaking into his ear._) Eh? eh? eh? ASTON. Go away, you pig. Go away. (_He holds up his dummy as a shield: CAIN retires discomfited._) ASTON'S DUMMY. Have you read any amusing novels lately? TOPSY. (_Speaking over the head of her dummy._) No; I never read novels. They are mostly so frightful, aren't they? ASTON.