ACT II

Next day at noon, in the Library of the Ibsen club. A
spacious room, with glass doors right and left. At the
back, in the middle, is the fireplace, surmounted by a
handsome mantelpiece, with a bust of Ibsen, and
decorated inscriptions of the titles of his plays.
There are circular recesses at each side of fireplace,
with divan seats running round them, and windows at the
top, the space between the divan and the window sills
being lined with books. A long settee is placed before
the fire. Along the back of the settee, and touching
it, is a green table, littered with journals. A
revolving bookcase stands in the foreground, a little
to the left, with an easy chair close to it. On the
right, between the door and the recess, is a light
library stepladder. Placards inscribed "silence" are
conspicuously exhibited here and there.

(Cuthbertson is seated in the easy chair at the revolving bookstand,
reading the "Daily Graphic." Dr. Paramore is on the divan in the right
hand recess, reading "The British Medical Journal." He is young as age
is counted in the professions--barely forty. His hair is wearing bald
on his forehead; and his dark arched eyebrows, coming rather close
together, give him a conscientiously sinister appearance. He wears the
frock coat and cultivates the "bedside manner" of the fashionable
physician with scrupulous conventionality. Not at all a happy or frank
man, but not consciously unhappy nor intentionally insincere, and
highly self satisfied intellectually.