Start: Princess: Now I’ve got you to mys...

Start: Princess: Now I’ve got you to myself for two minutes. You will help me with my concert, won’t you?

Pearl: Of course. What do you want me to do? I’ll make Arthur Fenwick take any number of tickets. You know how charitable he is for a very good cause. Pearl: I’m sure it is. But don’t harrow me with revolting stories of starving children. I’m not interested in the poor.

Princess: [Smiling] How can you say that?

Pearl: Are you? I often wonder if your philanthropy isn’t an elaborate pose. You don’t mind my saying that, do you?

Princess: Not at all. You have no heart, and you can’t imagine that anyone else should have.

Pearl: I have plenty of heart, but it beats for people of my own class.

Princess: I’ve only found one thing really worth doing with all this money I have, and that is to help a little those who need help.

Pearl: So long as it makes you happy.

Princess: It doesn’t, but it prevents me from being utterly miserable.

Pearl: You make me so impatient, Flora. You’ve got more money than you know what to do with. You’re a princess. You’ve practically got rid of your husband. I cannot imagine what more you want. I wish I could get rid of mine.

Princess: [Smiling.] I don’t know what you’ve got to complain of in George.

Pearl: That’s just it. I shouldn’t mind if he beat me or made love to chorus girls. I could divorce him then. Oh, my dear, thank your stars that you had a husband who was grossly unfaithful to you. Mine wants me to live nine months of the year in the country and have a baby every five minutes. I didn’t marry an Englishman for that.

Princess; Why did you marry him?

Pearl: I made a mistake. I’d lived all my life in New York. I was very ignorant. I thought if you were a lord you must be in society.

Princess: I often wonder if you’re happy, Pearl.

Pearl: Do you? Of course I’m happy.

Princess; An ambassador told me the other day that you were the most powerful woman in London. It’s very wonderful how you’ve made your way. You had nothing very much to help you.

Pearl: Shall I tell you how it was done? By force of character, wit, unscrupulousness, and push.

Princess: [Smiling] You’re very frank.

Pearl: That has always been my pose.

Princess: I sometimes think there’s positive genius in the way you’ve ignored the snubs of the great.

Pearl: [With a chuckle.] You’re being very unpleasant, Flora.

Princess: And there’s something very like heroism in the callousness with which you’ve dropped people when they’ve served your turn.

Pearl: You’re driving me to the conclusion that you don’t altogether approve of me.

Princess: On the other hand I can’t help admiring you. You’ve brought all the determination, insight, vigour, strength, which have made our countrymen turn America into what it is, to get what you wanted. In a way your life has been a work of art. And what makes it more complete is that what you’ve aimed at is trivial, transitory, and worthless.

Pearl: My dear Flora, people don’t hunt in order to catch a fox.

Princess: Sometimes, doesn’t it make you rather nervous, when you’re sitting on the top of your ladder, in case anyone should give it a kick as he passes?

Pearl: It’ll want more than a kick to topple my ladder over.

Citation: W. Somerset Maugham, Our Betters, William Heinemann LTD, 1924, pp. 41-45.

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