Are you in your senses?
TANNER.
Do you forget what we told you?
HECTOR. [recklessly] I don't care what you told me.
RAMSDEN. [scandalized] Tut tut, sir!
Monstrous! [he flings away towards the gate, his elbows quivering with indignation]
TANNER.
Another madman!
These men in love should be locked up. [He gives Hector up as hopeless, and turns away towards the garden, but Malone, taking offence in a new direction, follows him and compels him, by the aggressivenes of his tone, to stop].
MALONE.
I don't understand this.
Is Hector not good enough for this lady, pray?
TANNER.
My dear sir, the lady is married already.
Hector knows it; and yet he persists in his infatuation.
Take him home and lock him up.
MALONE. [bitterly] So this is the high-born social tone I've spoilt by my ignorant, uncultivated behavior!
Makin love to a married woman! [He comes angrily between Hector and Violet, and almost bawls into Hector's left ear] You've picked up that habit of the British aristocracy, have you?
HECTOR.
That's all right.
Don't you trouble yourself about that.
I'll answer for the morality of what I'm doing.
TANNER. [coming forward to Hector's right hand with flashing eyes] Well said, Malone!
You also see that mere marriage laws are not morality!
I agree with you; but unfortunately Violet does not.
MALONE.
I take leave to doubt that, sir. [Turning on Violet] Let me tell you, Mrs Robinson, or whatever your right name is, you had no right to send that letter to my son when you were the wife of another man.
HECTOR. [outraged] This is the last straw.
Dad: you have insulted my wife.
MALONE. YOUR wife!
TANNER. YOU the missing husband!
Another moral impostor! [He smites his brow, and collapses into Malone's chair].
MALONE.
You've married without my consent!
RAMSDEN.
You have deliberately humbugged us, sir!
HECTOR.
Here: I have had just about enough of being badgered.
Violet and I are married: that's the long and the short of it.
Now what have you got to say—any of you?
MALONE.
I know what I've got to say.
She's married a beggar.
HECTOR.
No; she's married a Worker [his American pronunciation imparts an overwhelming intensity to this simple and unpopular word]. I start to earn my own living this very afternoon.
MALONE. [sneering angrily] Yes: you're very plucky now, because you got your remittance from me yesterday or this morning, I reckon.
Wait til it's spent. You won't be so full of cheek then.
HECTOR. [producing a letter from his pocketbook] Here it is [thrusting it on his father]. Now you just take your remittance and yourself out of my life.
I'm done with remittances; and I'm done with you.
I don't sell the privilege of insulting my wife for a thousand dollars.