Poor Harold!

by Floyd Dell

Genre: Comedy
Setting: America
Format of Original Source: Play
Recommended Adaptation Length:

Candidate for Adaptation? Promising

EXCERPT:

MRS. FALCINGTON. In the seven years of our marriage, he has made love to every pretty woman he came across.

ISABEL. (sharply) Why did you stand for it?

MRS. FALCINGTON. Because I was a fool. And because he is a child.

ISABEL. (almost pleadingly) He can write poetry, can’t he?

MRS. FALCINGTON. Yes. Yes! Oh, yes!

ISABEL. Then–I suppose–it’s all right. But I’m angry at myself, just the same, for being taken in.

MRS. FALCINGTON. It’s strange…. You feel humiliated at having been made a fool of for seven days. I’ve been made a fool of for seven years, and I’ve never realized that I had a right to feel ashamed.

ISABEL. That’s the difference between Greenwich Village and Evanston, Illinois.

MRS. FALCINGTON. Yes. But when I go back I shall lose the sense of it. I’ll think I’m an injured woman because he was unfaithful to me, or because he brought scandal upon the family, or something like that. Now I realize that it’s none of those things. It’s–it’s just an offence against–my human dignity. I’ve been treated like–like an inferior. But why shouldn’t I be treated like an inferior? I am an inferior. When I go back to Evanston, and take up grass-widowhood and the burden of living down the family scandal, and sit and twiddle my thumbs in a big house, and have my maiden aunt come to live with me—-

ISABEL. But why should you do that? If that’s what it means to go back to Evanston, don’t go! Stay here!

MRS. FALCINGTON. But–what could I do?

ISABEL. Do? Why–why–go on the stage!

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