An ideal husband

Name: An ideal husband
Author: Oscar Wilde

by Oscar Wilde

Pages: about 113
Category: Literature & Fiction
Language: English
Reading time: 2.1 h at 250 wpm

Start readingThe whole book, as cards or one word at a time. 69 min at 450 wpm in Read mode.

From the opening

First Published (Second Edition) by February 1908 Methuen & Co. Third Edition October 1909 Fourth edition October 1910 Fifth Edition May 1912
ACT I. The Octagon Room in Sir Robert Chiltern’s House in Grosvenor Square.
THE EARL OF CAVERSHAM Mr. Alfred Bishop. VISCOUNT GORING Mr. Charles H. Hawtrey. SIR ROBERT CHILTERN Mr. Lewis Waller. VICOMTE DE NANJAC Mr. Cosmo Stuart. MR. MONTFORD Mr. Harry Stanford. PHIPPS Mr. C. H. Brookfield. MASON Mr. H. Deane. JAMES Mr. Charles Meyrick. HAROLD Mr. Goodhart. LADY CHILTERN Miss Julia Neilson. LADY MARKBY Miss Fanny Brough. COUNTESS OF BASILDON Miss Vane Featherston. MRS. MARCHMONT Miss Helen Forsyth. MISS MABEL CHILTERN Miss Maud Millet. MRS. CHEVELEY Miss Florence West.
[The room is brilliantly lighted and full of guests. At the top of the staircase stands LADY CHILTERN, a woman of grave Greek beauty, about twenty-seven years of age. She receives the guests as they come up. Over the well of the staircase hangs a great chandelier with wax lights, which illumine a large eighteenth-century French tapestry—representing the Triumph of Love, from a design by Boucher—that is stretched on the staircase wall. On the right is the entrance to the music-room. The sound of a string quartette is faintly heard. The entrance on the left leads to other reception-rooms. MRS. MARCHMONT and LADY BASILDON, two very pretty women, are seated together on a Louis Seize sofa. They are types of exquisite fragility. Their affectation of manner has a delicate charm. Watteau would have loved to paint them.]
LADY BASILDON. Horribly tedious! Never know why I go. Never know why I go anywhere.
MRS. MARCHMONT. So do I. It puts one almost on a level with the commercial classes, doesn’t it? But dear Gertrude Chiltern is always telling me that I should have some serious purpose in life. So I come here to try to find one.

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An ideal husband

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