‘Careful!’ Stephen warned him.

‘It is grimy round the edge, and the lace is torn!’ said Roydon defiantly.

‘I think that’s a marvellous touch!’ said Valerie.

‘It’s surprising what a lot of dirt you can pick up from carpets, even where there’s a vacuum-cleaner, which I don’t suppose there would be in a place like that,’ said Maud. ‘I know those cheap theatrical lodging-houses, none better!’

‘It is not a theatrical lodging-house!’ said Roydon, goaded to madness. ‘It is, as you will shortly perceive, a bawdy lodging-house!’

Maud’s placid voice broke the stunned silence. ‘I expect they’re just as dirty,’ she said.

‘Look here!’ began Nathaniel thunderously.

Joseph intervened in a hurry. ‘Too many interruptions! We shall be putting Roydon off if we go on like this! I’m sure we’re none of us so old-fashioned that we mind a little outspokenness!’

‘Speak for yourself!’ said Nathaniel.

‘He is speaking for himself,’ said Stephen. ‘To do him justice, he is also speaking for most of the assembled company.’

‘Perhaps you would rather I didn’t read you any more?’ suggested Roydon stiffly. ‘I warn you, it is not meat for weak stomachs!’

‘Oh, you must go on!’ Valerie exclaimed. ‘I know I’m going to adore it. Do, everybody, stop interrupting!’

‘She sits motionless, staring at her reflection in the mirror,’ suddenly declaimed Paula, in thrilling accents. ‘Then she picks up a lipstick, and begins wearily to rub it on her mouth. A knock falls on the door. With a movement of instinctive coquetry, she pats her curls into position, straightens her tired body, and calls, “Come in!”’

The spectacle of Paula enacting these movements in the improbable setting of a respectable drawing-room proved to be too much for Mathilda. She explained between chokes that she was very sorry, but that recitations always had this deplorable effect on her.

‘What you can possibly find to laugh at I fail to see!’ said Paula, a dangerous light in her eyes. ‘Laughter was not the reaction I expected!’

‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Mathilda assured her penitently. ‘In fact, the more tragic recitations are the more I feel impelled to laugh.’

‘I know so well what you mean!’ said Joseph. ‘Ah, Paula, my dear, Tilda is paying you a greater tribute than you know! You conveyed such a feeling of tension in those few gestures that our Tilda’s nerves frayed under it. I remember once, when I was playing in Montreal, to a packed house, working up to a moment of unbearable tension. I felt my audience with me, hanging, as it were, on my lips. I paused for my climax; I knew myself to be holding the house in the hollow of my hand. Suddenly a man broke into laughter! Disconcerting? Yes, but I knew why he laughed, why he could not help laughing!’

‘I wouldn’t mind hazarding a guess myself,’ agreed Stephen.

This pleased Nathaniel so much that he changed his mind about banning the reading of Wormwood, and bade Roydon, for the third time, to get on with it.