Lady Chiltern Robert! Oh! it is horrible that I should have to ask you such a question—Robert, are you telling me the whole truth?

Sir Robert Chiltern Why do you ask me such a question?

[A pause]

Lady Chiltern Why do you not answer it?

Sir Robert Chiltern (sitting down) Gertrude, truth is a very complex thing, and politics is a very complex business. There are wheels within wheels. One may be under certain obligations to people that one must pay. Sooner or later in political life one has to compromise. Everyone does.

Lady Chiltern Compromise? Robert, why do you talk so differently tonight from the way I have always heard you talk? Why are you changed?

Sir Robert Chiltern I am not changed. But circumstances alter things.

Lady Chiltern Circumstances should never alter principles!

Sir Robert Chiltern But if I told you—

Lady Chiltern What?

Sir Robert Chiltern That it was necessary, vitally necessary?

Lady Chiltern It can never be necessary to do what is not honourable. Or if it be necessary, then what is it that I have loved! But it is not, Robert; tell me it is not. Why should it be? What gain would you get? Money? We have no need of that! And money that comes from a tainted source is a degradation. Power? But power is nothing in itself. It is a power to do good that is fine—that, and that only. What is it, then? Robert, tell me why you are going to do this dishonourable thing!

Sir Robert Chiltern Gertrude, you have no right to use that word. I told you it was a question of rational compromise. It is no more than that.

Lady Chiltern Robert, that is all very well for other men, for men who treat life simply as a sordid speculation; but not for you, Robert, not for you. You are different. All your life you have stood apart from others. You have never let the world soil you. To the world, as to myself, you have been an ideal always. Oh! be that ideal still. That great inheritance throw not away—that tower of ivory do not destroy. Robert, men can love what is beneath them—things unworthy, stained, dishonoured. We women worship when we love; and when we lose our worship, we lose everything. Oh! don’t kill my love for you, don’t kill that!

Sir Robert Chiltern Gertrude!

Lady Chiltern I know that there are men with horrible secrets in their lives—men who have done some shameful thing, and who in some critical moment have to pay for it, by doing some other act of shame—oh! don’t tell me you are such as they are! Robert, is there in your life any secret dishonour or disgrace? Tell me, tell me at once, that—

Sir Robert Chiltern That what?

Lady Chiltern (speaking very slowly) That our lives may drift apart.

Sir Robert Chiltern Drift apart?

Lady Chiltern That they may be entirely separate. It would be better for us both.