Children -- Drama; Comedy plays; England -- Drama; Fathers -- Drama; Runaway husbands -- Drama; Wives -- Drama
Mrs. Clandon and Gloria come in. Mrs. Clandon is between forty and
fifty, with a slight tendency to soft, sedentary fat, and a fair
remainder of good looks, none the worse preserved because she has
evidently followed the old tribal matronly fashion of making no
pretension in that direction after her marriage, and might almost be
suspected of wearing a cap at home. She carries herself artificially
well, as women were taught to do as a part of good manners by dancing
masters and reclining boards before these were superseded by the modern
artistic cult of beauty and health. Her hair, a flaxen hazel fading into
white, is crimped, and parted in the middle with the ends plaited and
made into a knot, from which observant people of a certain age infer
that Mrs. Clandon had sufficient individuality and good taste to stand
out resolutely against the now forgotten chignon in her girlhood. In
short, she is distinctly old fashioned for her age in dress and manners.
But she belongs to the forefront of her own period (say 1860-80) in a
jealously assertive attitude of character and intellect, and in being
a woman of cultivated interests rather than passionately developed
personal affections. Her voice and ways are entirely kindly and humane;
and she lends herself conscientiously to the occasional demonstrations
of fondness by which her children mark their esteem for her; but
displays of personal sentiment secretly embarrass her: passion in her
is humanitarian rather than human: she feels strongly about social
questions and principles, not about persons. Only, one observes that
this reasonableness and intense personal privacy, which leaves her
relations with Gloria and Phil much as they might be between her and the
children of any other woman, breaks down in the case of Dolly. Though
almost every word she addresses to her is necessarily in the nature of a
remonstrance for some breach of decorum, the tenderness in her voice is
unmistakable; and it is not surprising that years of such remonstrance
have left Dolly hopelessly spoiled.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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