CHARLES. Poor old Joan! They have all run away from you except this blackguard who has to go back to hell at twelve o’clock. And what can I do but follow Jack Dunois’ example, and go back to bed too? [_He does so_]. JOAN [_sadly_] Good night, Charlie. CHARLES [_mumbling in his pillows_] Goo ni. [_He sleeps. The darkness envelopes the bed_]. JOAN [_to the soldier_] And you, my one faithful? What comfort have you for Saint Joan? THE SOLDIER. Well, what do they all amount to, these kings and captains and bishops and lawyers and such like? They just leave you in the ditch to bleed to death; and the next thing is, you meet them down there, for all the airs they give themselves. What I say is, you have as good a right to your notions as they have to theirs, and perhaps better. [_Settling himself for a lecture on the subject_] You see, it’s like this. If—[_the first stroke of midnight is heard softly from a distant bell_]. Excuse me: a pressing appointment—[_He goes on tiptoe_]. _The last remaining rays of light gather into a white radiance descending on Joan. The hour continues to strike._ JOAN. O God that madest this beautiful earth, when will it be ready to receive Thy saints? How long, O Lord, how long? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Transcriber’s Notes George Bernard Shaw had strong beliefs about typography and English spelling reform. In printing his plays, he insisted on leaving out the apostrophes (which he called “uncouth bacillae”) in contractions like “cant” and “dont.” Shaw did use apostrophes in possessives and in some contractions, such as “it’s,” “I’ll,” “she’s,” and “that’s.” He also refused to use dashes in numbers like “twentyfive.” This edition omits apostrophes and dashes where Shaw omitted them, leaves them in where he left them in, and makes changes only for consistency, in a few cases listed below. In the HTML version of this text, these words punctuated in nonstandard ways are marked with an invisible tag, <span class="nonstandard">. In the HTML version, semantic tagging has been added to the play. The tags are: A line of dialogue: <div class="line"> The character speaking: <span class="speaker"> The remainder of the line: <span class="speech"> A stage direction inside a line: <span class="sd-in"> A stage direction on its own line: <span class="sd-out"> The punctuation of stage directions is inconsistent in the printed text and has been left as printed. This file uses _underscores_ to indicate italic text. Shaw also sometimes showed emphasis with extra space between the letters of a word; this is shown in this plain text version like t h i s. Itemized changes from the original text: