[_JOHN hurries in to telephone. ERNEST starts too, as if to stop him but restrains the impulse. He stands alone by the door gazing out over the landscape while LUCY, THEODORE, and the JUDGE discuss him in low tones by the tea-table._
Can't you see, you stupid men! He's crazy about her--but thinks there's no hope.
When she finds he's leaving for a year ... she'll change her mind about marriage!
[_ERNEST comes back to earth and to the house-party._
Ahem! We were just discussing the marriage danger--I mean the marriage problem.
See here! When are _you_ ever going to marry?
When am I ever going to get more than two thousand a year?
Bah! what has money got to do with it! Just you wait till the right one comes along.
[_HELEN comes along, stealing up the steps from the garden on tiptoe with the grave, absorbed look of a hunter stalking game. She catches sight of the man she wants and stops short, as motionless as if frozen. But not so! Her lovely hands were poised; one of them now goes to her bosom and presses there. There is nothing icy about this New Woman now._
[_as unconscious of danger as a mountain-lion on an inaccessible height, smiles easily at his sentimental old friend THEODORE_]
How do you know "the right one" hasn't come already?
[_THEODORE catches sight of HELEN. She shakes her head in silent pleading, taps a finger on her lips, and in a panic flees noiselessly across toward the door._
[_HELEN stops at the door and makes a face at THEODORE._
Oh, I couldn't stop her, even if I wanted to.
To marry me? Oh, no! She hasn't any money.
You don't suppose I'd marry a woman who hadn't any? Most selfish thing a poor man can do.
Oh, fiddlesticks! You modern young people--
Make her a sort of superior servant in an inferior home--not that girl!
Feministic nonsense! The old-fashioned womanly woman----
Sentimental twaddle! What makes it more "womanly" to do menial work _for_ men than intellectual work with them?
[_HELEN delighted, applauds noiselessly._
All the same, I'll bet you wouldn't let a little thing like that stand in your way if you really cared for a woman enough to marry her.
But, as it happens, I don't. Nothing could induce me to marry.
[_HELEN raises her chin, her eyes glitter dangerously._