ANN: That’s what Ninian’s generation misses. They take themselves very seriously, but somehow they are not in the least formidable. Just very long and a tiny bit ridiculous. SELINA: I still believe in a municipal solution for them. [_Enter THOMPSON._ THOMPSON: Mr. Jordan has motored down from London. Could your Ladyship see him? [_Dead silence. ANN gets very white._ TIM: You’d better see him, hadn’t you? We’ll go. [_ANN nods yes._ [_SELINA kisses her silently._ [_LORD WILLIAM stays behind a second; takes her in his arms._ LORD WILLIAM: I understand, my darling, but believe me he’s not worth it. [_LORD WILLIAM and JORDAN meet in the door and bow, but do not shake hands._ [_There is a pause._ ANN (_nervously_): Philip, you look so strange. PHILIP (_with a bitter laugh_): Strange! ANN: Set and hard, with a different voice, not your voice for me. PHILIP: Ann, there are moments when you don’t seem to me quite normal. ANN: I don’t understand. PHILIP: I have come here to talk sense, not to make love. ANN: Love is the only sense in the world. PHILIP: In the whole of my life I have never met anyone so deliberately blind as you are. You ignore all values except the ones you have created yourself. Quite suddenly, on the spur of the moment, you ruin my reputation and your own and then sit there quite calmly, talking about love. ANN: But I love you. PHILIP: What in God’s name has love got to do with it? ANN: What else has anything to do with it? PHILIP: Your reputation, my career. ANN: You see, they were all attacking you, saying monstrous, wicked, lying things, I couldn’t sit there and listen. I simply told them the truth. PHILIP: What did they say? ANN: They said you were frightened. At least, someone suggested that, and then Mr. Molyneux said no, you were drunk, and that was why you had failed the Government. And Uncle Bill told them you had been with a woman—a woman you had picked up in the streets. PHILIP: Well? ANN: Naturally I denied it. I said that you had been with me. PHILIP: And they wouldn’t believe you? ANN: No. So I told them that you were my lover. PHILIP: Were you mad? ANN: Not in the least. It was the obvious thing to do. I couldn’t sit there and listen to them telling lies about you—I’m not ashamed of having loved you. PHILIP: Do you mean to sit there and tell me that all this arose simply because they said I had taken part in a drunken orgy? ANN: How could I let them say that? PHILIP: Good God, do you think anyone cares a damn? That that sort of thing doesn’t happen to everyone? ANN: I think that it matters very much for a man to fail his chief when he has trusted him, relied on him. PHILIP: And if I am with you, am I not equally failing my chief who has trusted me, relied on me? Doesn’t that matter? ANN: I think that matters too. But somehow, love is a different world—far away beyond our ordinary lives. It makes everything else seem so distant and irrelevant.