ELLIE. Your house is not Heartbreak House: is it, Lady Utterword?
HECTOR. Yet she breaks hearts, easy as her house is. That poor devil upstairs with his flute howls when she twists his heart, just as Mangan howls when my wife twists his.
LADY UTTERWORD. That is because Randall has nothing to do but have his heart broken. It is a change from having his head shampooed. Catch anyone breaking Hastings' heart!
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. The numskull wins, after all.
LADY UTTERWORD. I shall go back to my numskull with the greatest satisfaction when I am tired of you all, clever as you are.
MANGAN [huffily]. I never set up to be clever.
MANGAN. Well, I don't see that quite, either.
LADY UTTERWORD. You may not be clever, Mr Mangan; but you are successful.
MANGAN. But I don't want to be regarded merely as a successful man. I have an imagination like anyone else. I have a presentiment.
MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, you are impossible, Alfred. Here I am devoting myself to you; and you think of nothing but your ridiculous presentiment. You bore me. Come and talk poetry to me under the stars. [She drags him away into the darkness].
MANGAN [tearfully, as he disappears]. Yes: it's all very well to make fun of me; but if you only knew--
HECTOR [impatiently]. How is all this going to end?
MAZZINI. It won't end, Mr Hushabye. Life doesn't end: it goes on.
ELLIE. Oh, it can't go on forever. I'm always expecting something. I don't know what it is; but life must come to a point sometime.
LADY UTTERWORD. The point for a young woman of your age is a baby.
HECTOR. Yes, but, damn it, I have the same feeling; and I can't have a baby.
HECTOR. But I have children. All that is over and done with for me: and yet I too feel that this can't last. We sit here talking, and leave everything to Mangan and to chance and to the devil. Think of the powers of destruction that Mangan and his mutual admiration gang wield! It's madness: it's like giving a torpedo to a badly brought up child to play at earthquakes with.
MAZZINI. I know. I used often to think about that when I was young.
HECTOR. Think! What's the good of thinking about it? Why didn't you do something?
MAZZINI. But I did. I joined societies and made speeches and wrote pamphlets. That was all I could do. But, you know, though the people in the societies thought they knew more than Mangan, most of them wouldn't have joined if they had known as much. You see they had never had any money to handle or any men to manage. Every year I expected a revolution, or some frightful smash-up: it seemed impossible that we could blunder and muddle on any longer. But nothing happened, except, of course, the usual poverty and crime and drink that we are used to. Nothing ever does happen. It's amazing how well we get along, all things considered.