You Never Can Tell

by [George] Bernard Shaw




Act I

In a dentist's operating room on a fine August morning in 1896. Not
the usual tiny London den, but the best sitting room of a furnished
lodging in a terrace on the sea front at a fashionable watering place.
The operating chair, with a gas pump and cylinder beside it, is half way
between the centre of the room and one of the corners. If you look into
the room through the window which lights it, you will see the fireplace
in the middle of the wall opposite you, with the door beside it to your
left; an M.R.C.S. diploma in a frame hung on the chimneypiece; an easy
chair covered in black leather on the hearth; a neat stool and bench,
with vice, tools, and a mortar and pestle in the corner to the right.
Near this bench stands a slender machine like a whip provided with a
stand, a pedal, and an exaggerated winch. Recognising this as a dental
drill, you shudder and look away to your left, where you can see another
window, underneath which stands a writing table, with a blotter and a
diary on it, and a chair. Next the writing table, towards the door, is a
leather covered sofa. The opposite wall, close on your right, is
occupied mostly by a bookcase. The operating chair is under your nose,
facing you, with the cabinet of instruments handy to it on your left.
You observe that the professional furniture and apparatus are new, and
that the wall paper, designed, with the taste of an undertaker, in
festoons and urns, the carpet with its symmetrical plans of rich,