it's only good manners to be ashamed, dearie;" but it surprises me,
recollecting as I do the effect produced by Miss Fanny Brough's delivery
of that line, that gentlemen who shivered like violets in a zephyr as
it swept through them, should so completely miss the full width of its
application as to go home and straightway make a public exhibition of
mock modesty.

My old Independent Theatre manager, Mr Grein, besides that reproach to
me for shattering his ideals, complains that Mrs Warren is not wicked
enough, and names several romancers who would have clothed her black
soul with all the terrors of tragedy. I have no doubt they would; but
if you please, my dear Grein, that is just what I did not want to do.
Nothing would please our sanctimonious British public more than to throw
the whole guilt of Mrs Warren's profession on Mrs Warren herself. Now
the whole aim of my play is to throw that guilt on the British public
itself. You may remember that when you produced my first play, Widowers'
Houses, exactly the same misunderstanding arose. When the virtuous young
gentleman rose up in wrath against the slum landlord, the slum
landlord very effectively shewed him that slums are the product, not
of individual Harpagons, but of the indifference of virtuous young
gentlemen to the condition of the city they live in, provided they
live at the west end of it on money earned by someone else's labor. The
notion that prostitution is created by the wickedness of Mrs Warren
is as silly as the notion--prevalent, nevertheless, to some extent in
Temperance circles--that drunkenness is created by the wickedness of
the publican. Mrs Warren is not a whit a worse woman than the reputable
daughter who cannot endure her. Her indifference to the ultimate social
consequences of her means of making money, and her discovery of that
means by the ordinary method of taking the line of least resistance to
getting it, are too common in English society to call for any special