Lady Windermere's Fan: Act IV

How securely one thinks one lives—out of reach of temptation, sin, folly.

I can fancy a person doing a wonderful act of self-sacrifice, doing it spontaneously, recklessly, nobly—and afterwards finding out that it costs too much.

She accepts public disgrace in the house of another to save me....There is a bitter irony in things, a bitter irony in the way we talk of good and bad women.

I thought she wanted to be good, to get back into a place that she had lost by a moment’s folly, to lead again a decent life.

What are called good women may have terrible things in them, mad moods of recklessness, assertion, jealousy, sin.

Bad women, as they are termed, may have in them sorrow, repentance, pity, sacrifice.

The English climate doesn’t suit me.

I want a photograph of you, Lady Windermere—would you give me one? You don’t know how gratified I should be.

But rather than my wife should know—that the mother whom she was taught to consider as dead, the mother whom she has mourned as dead, is living—a divorced woman, going about under an assumed name, a bad woman preying upon life, as I know you now to be—rather than that, I was ready to supply you with money to pay bill after bill, extravagance after extravagance, to risk what occurred yesterday, the first quarrel I have ever had with my wife.

You sully the innocence that is in her.

And then I used to think that with all your faults you were frank and honest.

Oh, I am not going to mince words for you.

You knew that to spare her the ignominy of learning that a woman like you was her mother, I would endure anything.

And as for your blunder in taking my wife’s fan from here and then leaving it about in Darlington’s rooms, it is unpardonable.

Oh, I’m sure she will have no objection.

Oh, don’t imagine I am going to have a pathetic scene with her, weep on her neck and tell her who I am, and all that kind of thing.

I thought I had no heart. I find I have, and a heart doesn’t suit me, Windermere. Somehow it doesn’t go with modern dress. It makes one look old. [Takes up hand-mirror from table and looks into it.] And it spoils one’s career at critical moments.

If you do, I will make my name so infamous that it will mar every moment of her life.

She remains quite impassive.

My dear fellow, she has explained every demmed thing. We all wronged her immensely.