I daresay but I've not met many of that sort. Anyhow, that was what I was like. I don't say I was happy in it; but I wasn't unhappy, because I wasn't drifting. I was steering a course and had work in hand. Give a man health and a course to steer; and he'll never stop to trouble about whether he's happy or not. (LADY CICELY: Sometimes he won't even stop to trouble about whether other people are happy or not.) I don't deny that: nothing makes a man so selfish as work. But I was not self-seeking: it seemed to me that I had put justice above self. I tell you life meant something to me then. Do you see that dirty little bundle of scraps of paper? (LADY CICELY: What are they?) Accounts cut out of newspapers. Speeches made by my uncle at charitable dinners, or sentencing men to death--pious, highminded speeches by a man who was to me a thief and a murderer! To my mind they were more weighty, more momentous, better revelations of the wickedness of law and respectability than the book of the prophet Amos. What are they now? (He quietly tears the newspaper cuttings into little fragments and throws them away, looking fixedly at her meanwhile.)

Brassbound Monologue from Captain Brassbound's Conversion

Rehearse Brassbound's monologue