(The play is set in the front yard of a neat cottage by the sea—a cottage inhabited by a young woman named Mary Deer and her termagant mother. As the play opens, the two women are undergoing an amorous visitation by Mary Deer’s current suitor, CaptainTerrapin Outport).
TO: I trust you will accept this token of my continually revised estimation. I herewith offer you this haven of stygian blooms, as soft as soot.
MARY DEER: You bring me a cloud of smoke!
MARY DEER’S MOTHER: Take this botanical filth away!
TO: Madame, I offer Mary these sinister posies so that she may not think me frivolous. (Turning to Mary Deer) No old-lady sunsets here, Mary Deer. These flowers are as heavy as oil.
MARY DEER’S MOTHER: Ashes and arches! They make me cold.
MARY DEER: The blossoms are indeed as bright as staples, Terrapin, but the strangled leaves and overarching stems are black as any barbed-wire crow!
TO: Mary Deer, we two are surfeited with easy sugarshack beauty. We need blooms as empty as foam or famine! This particular outburst is Nightshade—harvested from the dragon evenings of the Ancients.
MARY DEER’S MOTHER: But your suitor’s task was to move her with light, and you come to her with these floral entrails!!
TO: No, bleak mother of Mary Deer, my resolve is to bring to your daughter posies grown in the hard clay of evacuated stables and watered with the acid dew of the world’s exhalations. Anything breezier would, in my outsourced estimation, sweep her tiny parts back into her own bloodstream.
MARY DEER (annoyed): I will have something to say about that, Captain Outport!
MARY DEER’S MOTHER and T.O. (both turning to Mary Deare and speaking together): Oh yes? What?
(curtain)
