In my own piece, which followed, Robina and Bute played a young married couple who do not know how to quarrel. It has always struck me how much more satisfactorily people quarrel on the stage than in real life. On the stage the man, having made up his mind—to have it out, enters and closes the door. He lights a cigarette; if not a teetotaller mixes himself a brandy-and-soda. His wife all this time is careful to remain silent. Quite evident it is that he is preparing for her benefit something unpleasant, and chatter might disturb him. To fill up the time she toys with a novel or touches softly the keys of the piano until he is quite comfortable and ready to begin. He glides into his subject with the studied calm of one with all the afternoon before him. She listens to him in rapt attention. She does not dream of interrupting him; would scorn the suggestion of chipping in with any little notion of her own likely to disarrange his train of thought. All she does when he pauses, as occasionally he has to for the purpose of taking breath, is to come to his assistance with short encouraging remarks, such, for instance, as: “Well.” “You think that.” “And if I did?” Her object seems to be to help him on. “Go on,” she says from time to time, bitterly. And he goes on. Towards the end, when he shows signs of easing up, she puts it to him as one sportsman to another: Is he quite finished? Is that all? Sometimes it isn’t. As often as not he has been saving the pick of the basket for the last. “No,” he says, “that is not all. There is something else!” That is quite enough for her. That is all she wanted to know. She merely asked in case there might be. As it appears there is, she re-settles herself in her chair and is again all ears. When it does come—when he is quite sure there is nothing he has forgotten, no little point that he has overlooked, she rises. “I have listened patiently,” she begins, “to all that you have said.” (The devil himself could not deny this. “Patience” hardly seems the word. “Enthusiastically” she might almost have said). “Now”—with rising inflection—“you listen to me.” The stage husband—always the gentleman—bows;—stiffly maybe, but quite politely; and prepares in his turn to occupy the _rôle_ of dumb but dignified defendant. To emphasise the coming change in their positions, the lady most probably crosses over to what has hitherto been his side of the stage; while he, starting at the same moment, and passing her about the centre, settles himself down in what must be regarded as the listener’s end of the room. We then have the whole story over again from her point of view; and this time it is the gentleman who would bite off his tongue rather than make a retort calculated to put the lady off.