description: Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free.This is an OCR edition with typos.Excerpt from YOU NEVER CAN TELL ACT I In a dentist's operating room on a fine August morning in 1896. Not the usual tiny London den, but the best sitting room of a furnished lodging in a terrace on the sea front at a fashionable watering place. The operating chair, tvith a gas pump and cylinder beside it, it half nay between the centre of the room and one of the corners. If you look into the room through the window which lights it, you mill see the fireplace in the middle of the mall opposite you, with the door beside it to your left; an M.R.C.S. diploma in a frame hung on the chimneypiece; an easy chair covered in black leather on the hearth; a neat stool and bench, tvith vice, tools, and a mortar and pestle in the corner to the right. Near this bench stands a slender machine like a whip provided with a stand, a pedal, and an exaggerated winch. Recognising this as a dental drill, you shudder and look away to your left, where you can see another window, underneath which stands a writing table, with a blotter and a diary on it, and a chair. Next the writing table, towards the door, is a leather covered sofa. The opposite mall, close on your right, is occupied mostly by a bookcase. The operating chair is under your nose, facing you, with the cabinet of instruments handy to it on your left. You observe that the professional furniture and apparatus are new, and that the wall paper, designed, with the taste of an undertaker, in festoons and urns, the carpet withif symmetrical plans of rich, cabbagy nosegay, theglass gasalier with lustres; the ornamental gilt rimmed blue candlesticks on the ends of the mantelshelf, also glass- draped with lustres, and the ormolu clock under a glass cover in the middle between them, its uselessness emphasized by a cheap American clock disrespectfully placed be...
language: English
title: Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant
titlecomplete: Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant (Collected Works)
ratings_count: 10
publisher: Classic Books