Judd Shoemaker, playing Harold, is a good physical match—a slight man, given heft by brogue shoes, a thick mustache, and a pipe. Before this, Cate has only seen him in movies. Onstage he has to project. He’s skillful, though, and by now, toward the end of rehearsals, he has blended into this role. He smells of cherry pipe tobacco and tweed.

Harold has just come into their library; Vita is at a small writing table, intent on a note she’s writing, scratching away with one of the fountain pens Cate found at the used-desk store.

HAROLD

Who’s the favored recipient of that letter? Mrs. Campbell?

[Mary Campbell is a new interest of Vita’s.]

VITA

No. The recipient is Mrs. Woolf.

[Vita is arranging the assignation with Virginia when Vita goes up to London. She will arrive half an hour early to meet Virginia in the basement. The scene lays out the terms of Vita and Harold’s philandering. Harold takes his pipe, knocks the ashes out of it into a standing ashtray, and leaves it there. He sits on the arm of the sofa.]

HAROLD

Perhaps, between kisses, you might tell her I’ve a notion to do a book on George Curzon, his postwar policies. I’m thinking Hogarth might be interested.

When Vita says nothing, just keeps scratching away with her pen, he falls gracefully backward, onto the couch. Molly, in the front row with Lauren, holds up a gnarly hand to stop the clock, then hoists herself out of her seat and totters up the steps to the stage.

“Judd, I’d like you to do something a little faggy here. Just to underline. Vita doesn’t really have to do anything but look butch and commanding. I think it would be good counterpoint if you did something small that a straight man mightn’t.”

He gets up, goes back to the doorway, repeats his lines, falls backward onto the sofa, this time crossing his legs at the ankles, as he props them on the sofa arm.

“Perfect,” Molly says. The scene moves on.

HAROLD

[Stares at the ceiling.]

Your silence, is it cloaking something we ought to talk about? Is it, in fact, speaking volumes?

VITA

Well, perhaps one. A slender volume. You’re going to scold me now, aren’t you?

HAROLD

I’m just saying you have to keep in mind that you don’t have la main heureuse when it comes to other peoples’ marriages. And you might want to be particularly careful with Virginia. She’s really too mentally delicate for your hijinks. You wouldn’t want to tip her over her edge. You might not see her advancing toward that, given there is so little in the way of edges for you.

VITA