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Lady Bracknell sweeps in, ordering him to rise from “semi-recumbent posture.” Gwendolen restrains Jack and announces the engagement. Lady Bracknell icily denies it—an engagement should be a surprise—and sends Gwendolen to the carriage with questions. The lovers blow kisses behind her back.
The interview is Wilde at his most withering. Lady Bracknell produces notebook and pencil, approving Jack smoking, considering twenty-nine a good age, and praising his knowing nothing—“ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.” Seven or eight thousand a year satisfies her; a country house with fifteen hundred acres is acceptable. A town house at 149 Belgrave Square distresses her—“the unfashionable side”—but might be altered. She takes his Liberal Unionism as a Tory, then asks about his parents.
Jack admits he has lost both. To lose one parent, Lady Bracknell observes, may be a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness. Who was his father? Jack confesses his parents seem to have lost him—he doesn’t know who he is by birth. He was found. In a hand-bag. A large black leather hand-bag with handles. The late Mr. Thomas Cardew found it in the cloak-room at Victoria Station, Brighton line, and named him Worthing because he had a first-class ticket for that Sussex seaside resort.
Lady Bracknell is aghast. To be born in a hand-bag, with or without handles, displays “a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution.” A railway cloak-room might conceal social indiscretion but can hardly form “an assured basis for a recognised position in good society.” She advises him to acquire relations and produce at least one parent before the season ends, sweeping out in majestic indignation.
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