The Wasp — 1914 — page 319: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

This page contains dialogue between two young men gossiping about a third person named Percy. One speaker details Percy's social decline: born to a wealthy family (his grandfather was a corset-maker), Percy married beneath his class—a tailor's daughter from Berkshire. His disappointed family gave him money to leave, and he's now squandering it in low taverns, allegedly beating and starving his wife. The satire targets class pretension and moral hypocrisy among the British gentry. Percy represents the dissolute aristocrat—privileged yet self-destructive. The joke centers on his family's snobbery about his wife's lower-class origins while ignoring his own moral failings. The final question about why the wife stays hints at contemporary anxieties about women, marriage, and dependency.