Excerpt from A Bill of Divorcement: A Play in Three Acts The curtain rises on the hall, obviously used as the common-room of a country house. On the right (of the audience) is the outer door and a staircase that runs down from an upper landing towards the middle of the room, half hiding what has once been a separate smaller room with a baize door at the back. In the corner a French window opens on to a snowbound garden. On the left, facing the entrance, a log fire is blazing. Staircase, pictures, grandfather clock, etc., are wreathed with holly and mistletoe. At the breakfast table, which is laid for three and littered with paper and string, sit Miss Hester Fairfield and Margaret Fairfield, her niece by marriage. The third chair has two or three parcels piled up on it. Hester Fairfield is one of those twitching, high-minded, elderly ladies in black, who keep a grievance as they might keep a pet dog - as soon as it dies they replace it by another. The grievance of the moment seem to be the empty third chair, and Margaret Fairfield is, as usual, on the defensive. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.