Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hi, my name's Dave Stevens
and this is from The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde.
What you really are is a Bunburyist.
I was quite right in saying you were a Bunburyist.
You are one of the most advanced Bunburyists I know.
You have invented a very useful younger brother called Earnest
in order that you may be able to come up to town as often as you like.
I have invented an invaluable permanent invalid called Bunbury,
in order that I may be able to go down into the country whenever I choose.
Bunbury is perfectly invaluable.
If it wasn’t for Bunbury’s extraordinary bad health for instance,
I wouldn’t be able to dine with you at the Willis’s tonight,
for I have been really engaged to Aunt Augusta for more than a week.
I haven’t the smallest intention of dining with Aunt Augusta tonight.
To begin with – I dined there on Monday and once a week
is quite enough to dine with one's own relatives.
In the second place, whenever I do dine there I am always treated
as a member of the family and either sent down with no woman at all or two.
In the third place I know perfectly well whom she will place me next to tonight.
She will place me next to Mary Farquhar who always flirts with her own husband
across the dinner table. That is not very pleasant. Indeed, it is not even decent -
and that sort of thing is enormously on the increase.
The amount of women in London
who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous.
It looks so bad. It is simply washing one’s clean linen in public.
Besides, now that I know you to be a confirmed Bunburyist,
I naturally want to talk to you about Bunburying.
I want to tell you the rules.