The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People Page #4

								

real motives. You are hardly serious enough. When one is placed in the
position of guardian, one has to adopt a very high moral tone on all
subjects. It’s one’s duty to do so. And as a high moral tone can hardly
be said to conduce very much to either one’s health or one’s happiness,
in order to get up to town I have always pretended to have a younger
brother of the name of Ernest, who lives in the Albany, and gets into
the most dreadful scrapes. That, my dear Algy, is the whole truth pure
and simple.

ALGERNON.
The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very
tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete
impossibility!

JACK.
That wouldn’t be at all a bad thing.

ALGERNON.
Literary criticism is not your forte, my dear fellow. Don’t try it. You
should leave that to people who haven’t been at a University. They do
it so well in the daily papers. What you really are is a Bunburyist. I
was quite right in saying you were a Bunburyist. You are one of the
most advanced Bunburyists I know.

JACK.
What on earth do you mean?

ALGERNON.
You have invented a very useful younger brother called Ernest, in order
that you may be able to come up to town as often as you like. I have
invented an invaluable permanent invalid called Bunbury, in order that
I may be able to go down into the country whenever I choose. Bunbury is
perfectly invaluable. If it wasn’t for Bunbury’s extraordinary bad
health, for instance, I wouldn’t be able to dine with you at Willis’s
to-night, for I have been really engaged to Aunt Augusta for more than
a week.

JACK.
I haven’t asked you to dine with me anywhere to-night.

ALGERNON.
I know. You are absurdly careless about sending out invitations. It is
very foolish of you. Nothing annoys people so much as not receiving
invitations.

JACK.
You had much better dine with your Aunt Augusta.

ALGERNON.
I haven’t the smallest intention of doing anything of the kind. To
begin with, I dined there on Monday, and once a week is quite enough to
dine with one’s own relations. In the second place, whenever I do dine
there I am always treated as a member of the family, and sent down with
either no woman at all, or two. In the third place, I know perfectly
well whom she will place me next to, to-night. She will place me next
Mary Farquhar, who always flirts with her own husband across the
dinner-table. That is not very pleasant. Indeed, it is not even decent
. . . and that sort of thing is enormously on the increase. The amount
of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly
scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing one’s clean linen in
public. Besides, now that I know you to be a confirmed Bunburyist I
naturally want to talk to you about Bunburying. I want to tell you the
rules.

JACK.
I’m not a Bunburyist at all. If Gwendolen accepts me, I am going to
kill my brother, indeed I think I’ll kill him in any case. Cecily is a
little too much interested in him. It is rather a bore. So I am going
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