Page:Heartbreak House, Great Catherine, and Playlets of the War.djvu/227

 more absorbed in the pamphlet, and more and more amused by it.

CATHERINE [greatly pleased by a passage, and turning over the leaf]. Ausgezeiehnet!

EDSTASTON. Ahem!


 * Silence. Catherine reads on.

CATHERINE. Wie komisch!

EDSTASTON. Ahem! ahem!


 * Silence.

CATHERINE [soliloquizing enthusiastically]. What a wonderful author is Monsieur Voltaire! How lucidly he exposes the folly of this crazy plan for raising the entire revenue of the country from a single tax on land! how he withers it with his irony! how he makes you laugh whilst he is convincing you! how sure one feels that the proposal is killed by his wit and economic penetration: killed never to be mentioned again among educated people!

EDSTASTON. For Heaven's sake, Madam, do you intend to leave me tied up like this while you discuss the blasphemies of that abominable infidel? Agh!! [She has again applied her toe.] Oh! Oo!

CATHERINE [calmly]. Do I understand you to say that Monsieur Voltaire is a great philanthropist and a great philosopher as well as the wittiest man in Europe?

EDSTASTON. Certainly not. I say that his books ought to be burnt by the common hangman [her toe touches his ribs]. Yagh! Oh don't. I shall faint. I can't bear it.

CATHERINE. Have you changed your opinion of Monsieur Voltaire?

EDSTASTON. But you can't expect me as a member of the Church of England [she tickles him] &mdash;agh! Ow! Oh Lord! he is anything you like. He is a philanthropist, a philosopher, a beauty: he ought to