Say the Right Thing

This chapter is a play, not a story or a poem. It has no narrator at all: everything you learn, about the plot, the characters' feelings and even the mood in the room, comes either from what the characters say or from short stage directions printed in brackets, such as (not very pleased) or (quickly). The playwright, G.C. Thornley, is credited at the very end of the text.

The play is printed in two scenes. Its own introductory line sums up the plot precisely: it is "a humorous play in which a mother advises her daughter to say the right thing at the right time," but "when guests arrive, the daughter hilariously forgets her mother's guidance," committing "blunders" that "embarrass the guests as well as her mother."

There are four characters in total. Mary is a young girl. Mrs. Shaw is her mother. Mrs. Harding is the wife of a wealthy man, Mr. Harding, who has just bought a large house in the town of Lanfield after living in London. Mrs. Lee is Mr. Harding's married sister, who has been staying with the Hardings for a while. The whole play takes place in and around Mrs. Shaw's home, on the day Mrs. Harding and Mrs. Lee come to visit.

Scene I is entirely preparation. Mrs. Shaw tells Mary to tidy away her coat before Mrs. Harding and Mrs. Lee arrive, and explains who they are: Mrs. Harding is the wife of a wealthy man who has just moved to Lanfield from London, and Mrs. Lee is his married sister, staying with them. Mary insists she can talk perfectly well and wants to stay in the room rather than go for a walk. Mrs. Shaw reluctantly agrees, but warns her plainly: "If you stay with me, you may not say the right thing." She then gives Mary careful advice: be kind, say things that will please people, laugh and make them laugh, keep the conversation going if everyone falls silent, and, most importantly, when the guests are ready to leave, look sorry rather than relieved, and say, "Must you go? Can't you stay?" Mary promises she will remember.

Scene II shows exactly how that promise goes. After a polite opening between Mrs. Shaw and Mrs. Harding, an awkward silence prompts Mary to speak, and the blunders begin. She compliments Mrs. Harding's "beautiful children," not knowing Mrs. Harding has none at all. She mocks a neighbour, Mr. Best, for being a dull commuting banker who "can't think," only for Mrs. Lee to reveal that her own brother lives exactly the same way. She laughs at a woman's choice of a blue dress with a red coat, which turns out to be Mrs. Harding's own habit. She says she cannot understand women who stay in bed in the mornings and call the doctor often, which describes both Mrs. Harding and Mrs. Lee. She calls another woman "too talkative," which turns out to describe Mrs. Lee's own mother. She criticises a dirty dog outside the window, which turns out to be the Hardings' own dog, Towzer. She even criticises a horse-riding, shooting neighbour, Mr. Pomeroy, unaware that Mrs. Lee's brother does exactly the same things. Finally, as the guests rise to leave, Mary gets her mother's one carefully rehearsed line exactly backwards, saying, "Oh, must you stay? Can't you go?"

Mary is talkative and sure of herself. She tells her mother, "I can talk very well when I like," and insists, "Anyone can talk." The play's humour depends on this confidence being completely out of proportion to her actual skill: every one of her remarks is a sweeping, careless opinion about someone, stated as plain fact, with no idea that the very person she is describing might be in the room or closely related to someone who is.

Mrs. Shaw is anxious to make a good impression on her new neighbours. She tells Mary directly that she wants Mrs. Harding "to ask me to go to their house," since "there isn't much to do here in Lanfield," and she wants "some more friends." Through Scene II, she tries again and again to patch over Mary's mistakes with quick recovery lines, such as "They must be someone else's children" and "I like blue dresses and red coats" — small, slightly desperate attempts to keep the visit from falling apart.

Mrs. Harding, the wife of the wealthy Mr. Harding, remains mostly composed despite being the target of several of Mary's blunders, about her children, her clothes, her mornings in bed and her dog. Only once does her patience visibly crack, when she replies "(not very pleased)" that she has no children at all. Mrs. Lee, Mr. Harding's sister, speaks less often, but twice volunteers a fact about her own brother that accidentally proves one of Mary's generalisations wrong — first about commuting bankers, then about men who ride horses and practise shooting.

The play's comedy is built on a single pattern, repeated with small variations roughly seven times. First, Mary states a broad, dismissive opinion about someone who is not present: Mrs. Harding's supposed children, the commuter Mr. Best, the badly dressed Mrs. Best, the bed-loving Mrs. Cotter, the talkative Mrs. Grantley, a dirty dog, and the horse-mad Mr. Pomeroy. Second, it turns out that the opinion applies, word for word, to someone actually in the room, or to a close relative of a guest, so the insult lands exactly where it should never have gone. Third comes a beat of silence, marked again and again by the stage direction "No one speaks" or "No one says anything," during which the embarrassment is left to sit rather than being explained away. Finally, Mrs. Shaw tries to recover with a quick change of subject or a hasty compliment, and Mary, undeterred, moves straight on to her next mistake.

This repetition is itself the joke: the audience quickly learns the pattern and starts to anticipate the next blunder before it lands, which is why the play can keep using the same basic structure seven times without feeling repetitive. The final twist tops even this pattern. After an entire play built on Mary saying the wrong thing by accident, the last line has her say the wrong thing on purpose, in effect, by getting the one line she deliberately memorised exactly backwards: "Oh, must you stay? Can't you go?" instead of "Must you go? Can't you stay?"

The play's central theme is that talking and tact are not the same skill. Mary genuinely believes that "anyone can talk" and that she has "been able to talk for a long time," but the whole of Scene II shows that simply having things to say is not the same as knowing whether those things should be said, or to whom. Her mother's advice, be kind, say things that please people, is about judgement, not vocabulary, and it is exactly the part Mary cannot manage.

Closely tied to this is a theme about confidence without self-awareness. Mary is never shy or uncertain; her problem is the opposite, she speaks freely and generalises confidently about people she barely knows, without pausing to consider who might be listening. The play gently suggests that this kind of overconfidence can cause more social damage than simple nervousness would.

There is also a theme about growing up and learning by doing. Mrs. Shaw tells Mary early on, "One day you'll have to go to some of these houses yourself and talk to the people there," framing this visit as a kind of first test of a skill Mary will need later in life. By that measure, Mary fails this particular test almost completely, but the play's light, forgiving tone suggests this is a normal, if painfully funny, part of learning.

Finally, the guests' restraint offers a quieter theme about good manners under provocation. Despite being insulted repeatedly, Mrs. Harding and Mrs. Lee mostly remain composed, perhaps out of consideration for Mrs. Shaw, which is itself a model of the very tact that Mary is shown to lack.

Because this is a play, every feeling has to be shown rather than told. Where a story might simply say a character was annoyed, this play relies on short bracketed cues, like (not very pleased) or (quickly), to tell an actor exactly how to deliver a line. When writing about the play, these stage directions are some of the strongest evidence available, since they are the one place the text tells you directly what a character is feeling.

The play also draws a careful distinction between two words that look similar but are not: say and tell. "Say" focuses on the message itself and does not always need a specific listener, as in Mrs. Shaw's question, "But does anyone want to hear the things that you say?" "Tell" focuses on who receives the message and always needs a listener, as in Mrs. Shaw's own "I can't tell you everything." Noticing which verb a sentence uses can be a clue to whether the focus is on the message or on the person receiving it.

Finally, the play's own "Let us learn" material points to suffixes, word endings that change a root word's meaning or part of speech, using examples drawn straight from its dialogue: humour + -ous = humorous, hilarious + -ly = hilariously, come + -ing = coming, and beauty + -ful = beautiful. Spotting these endings is a quick way to expand vocabulary while reading.

This chapter is also used to teach the four kinds of sentences, each identified directly from lines in the play. A declarative sentence states information and ends with a full stop, as in "There's always something to say." An interrogative sentence asks a question and ends with a question mark, as in "What shall I do when they want to go?" An exclamatory sentence expresses strong feeling and ends with an exclamation mark, as in "What beautiful children you have, Mrs. Harding!" (which is, ironically, also one of Mary's biggest mistakes). An imperative sentence gives an order or request and ends with a full stop, as in "Put that coat away in your bedroom," Mrs. Shaw's very first line in the play.

The play also demonstrates the present perfect continuous tense, formed with has/have + been + verb-ing, in the line "She has been staying with them for a while," said about Mrs. Lee. This tense is used to show the duration of an action that started in the past and continues up to the present moment, or an ongoing past action whose results are still visible now. Mrs. Lee's staying with the Hardings is exactly this kind of action: it began at some point before the play opens and is still true as the characters speak.

Both grammar points are easiest to remember by returning to their exact source line in the play, since each sentence type and tense is demonstrated by a real moment of dialogue rather than an invented example.