LUCAS: No! Oh, the unsympathetic women!...

LUCAS: No! Oh, the unsympathetic women! There you have the cause of half the world’s misery. The unsympathetic women--you should have loved one of them.

[ST. OLPHERTS: I dare say I’ve done that in my time.]

LUCAS: Love one of these women--I know!--worship her, yield yourself to the intoxicating day-dreams that make the grimy world sweeter than any heaven ever imagined. How your heart leaps with gratitude for your good fortune! What may you not accomplish with such a mate beside you; how high will be your aims, how paltry every obstacle that bars your way to them; how sweet is to be the labour, how divine the rest! Then--you marry her. Marry her, and in six months, if you’ve pluck enough to do it, lag behind your shooting party and blow your brains out, by accident, at the edge of a turnip-field. You have found out by that time all that there is to look for--the daily diminishing interest in your doings, the poorly assumed attention as you attempt to talk over some plan for the future; then the yawn, and by degrees, the covert sneer, the little sarcasm, and finally, the frank, open stare of boredom. Ah, Duke, when you carry out your repressive legislation against women of evil lives, don’t fail to include in your schedule the Unsympathetic Wives. They are the women whose victims show the sorriest scars; they are the really “bad women” of the world: all the others are snow-white in comparison!

Pinero, Arthur Wing, The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith, Oberon Books Ltd, 2014, pp. 90-91.