THE DEVIL'S DISCIPLE

Bernard Shaw




ACT I

At the most wretched hour between a black night and a wintry
morning in the year 1777, Mrs. Dudgeon, of New Hampshire, is
sitting up in the kitchen and general dwelling room of her farm
house on the outskirts of the town of Websterbridge. She is not a
prepossessing woman. No woman looks her best after sitting up all
night; and Mrs. Dudgeon's face, even at its best, is grimly
trenched by the channels into which the barren forms and
observances of a dead Puritanism can pen a bitter temper and a
fierce pride. She is an elderly matron who has worked hard
and got nothing by it except dominion and detestation in her
sordid home, and an unquestioned reputation for piety and
respectability among her neighbors, to whom drink and
debauchery are still so much more tempting than religion and
rectitude, that they conceive goodness simply as self-denial.
This conception is easily extended to others--denial, and finally
generalized as covering anything disagreeable. So Mrs. Dudgeon,
being exceedingly disagreeable, is held to be exceedingly good.
Short of flat felony, she enjoys complete license except for
amiable weaknesses of any sort, and is consequently, without
knowing it, the most licentious woman in the parish on the
strength of never having broken the seventh commandment or missed