GERALD. Oh, don't go. ANABEL. Yes, good night. (Exit.) OLIVER. She's NOT reformed, Gerald. She's the same old moral character--moral to the last bit of her, really--as she always was. GERALD. Is that what it is?--But one must be moral. OLIVER. Oh, yes. Oliver Cromwell wasn't as moral as Anabel is--nor such an iconoclast. GERALD. Poor old Anabel! OLIVER. How she hates the dark gods! GERALD. And yet they cast a spell over her. Poor old Anabel! Well, Oliver, is Bacchus the father of whisky? OLIVER. I don't know.--I don't like you either. You seem to smile all over yourself. It's objectionable. Good night. GERALD. Oh, look here, this is censorious. OLIVER. You smile to yourself. (Exit.) (Curtain.) ACT III SCENE I An old park. Early evening. In the background a low Georgian hall, which has been turned into offices for the Company, shows windows already lighted. GERALD and ANABEL walk along the path. ANABEL. How beautiful this old park is! GERALD. Yes, it is beautiful--seems so far away from everywhere, if one doesn't remember that the hall is turned into offices.--No one has lived here since I was a little boy. I remember going to a Christmas party at the Walsalls'. ANABEL. Has it been shut up so long? GERALD. The Walsalls didn't like it--too near the ugliness. They were county, you know--we never were: father never gave mother a chance, there. And besides, the place is damp, cellars full of water. ANABEL. Even now? GERALD. No, not now--they've been drained. But the place would be too damp for a dwelling-house. It's all right as offices. They burn enormous fires. The rooms are quite charming. This is what happens to the stately homes of England--they buzz with inky clerks, or their equivalent. Stateliness is on its last legs. ANABEL. Yes, it grieves me--though I should be bored if I had to be stately, I think.--Isn't it beautiful in this light, like an eighteenth-century aquatint? I'm sure no age was as ugly as this, since the world began. GERALD. For pure ugliness, certainly not. And I believe none has been so filthy to live in.--Let us sit down a minute, shall we? and watch the rooks fly home. It always stirs sad, sentimental feelings in me. ANABEL. So it does in me.--Listen! one can hear the coal-carts on the road--and the brook--and the dull noise of the town--and the beating of New London pit--and voices--and the rooks--and yet it is so still. We seem so still here, don't we? GERALD. Yes. ANABEL. Don't you think we've been wrong? GERALD. How? ANABEL. In the way we've lived--and the way we've loved. GERALD. It hasn't been heaven, has it? Yet I don't know that we've been wrong, Anabel. We had it to go through. ANABEL. Perhaps.--And, yes, we've been wrong, too. GERALD. Probably. Only, I don't feel it like that. ANABEL. Then I think you ought. You ought to feel you've been wrong. GERALD. Yes, probably. Only, I don't. I can't help it. I think we've gone the way we had to go, following our own natures.