Rupert and Miss Chilmark

The relationship between Rupert and Miss Chilmark is a running contest over Marlowe, Rupert’s large, wet, and poorly responsive dog. Miss Chilmark sees the animal as an intrusion that damages her clothes and unsettles meetings; Rupert treats her demands as excessive and defends the dog’s ordinary behavior. Their exchanges turn a practical disagreement about control into a public performance of irritation and teasing, with Marlowe repeatedly at its center.

The first dispute over Marlowe

When Marlowe enters a meeting, shakes water from his coat over the circle, and adds to the commotion by barking and rolling on his back, Miss Chilmark immediately protests that her dress is ruined and calls for someone to take him outside. Rupert appears and gives the dog a command, but Marlowe ignores it and shakes himself again. The failed command makes Miss Chilmark’s complaint pointed: the dog takes no notice of Rupert, she says, and ought to be leashed or left at home.

Rupert answers by defending Marlowe rather than promising to control him. He calls Miss Chilmark’s attitude flint-hearted and argues that attending the meeting is the high point of the dog’s week. To Rupert, shaking himself dry is simply what a wet dog does. Miss Chilmark counters with the prospect of sending Rupert the dry-cleaning bill, turning the animal’s muddy, physical presence into a cost Rupert might have to bear. Their disagreement is therefore not only about manners: it sets Miss Chilmark’s claim to consideration against Rupert’s insistence that Marlowe’s behavior should be tolerated.

The exchange also makes their conflict visible to the group. Rupert jokes that the Bloodhounds panic when a real dog appears, while Miss Chilmark refuses to accept the disruption as amusing. Polly Wycherley tries to restore order by asking everyone to return to their seats, but Miss Chilmark objects that the chairs are wet. The seats are wiped; Marlowe is attached by his lead to Rupert’s chair leg and made to lie outside the circle. The meeting resumes, but the arrangement gives a practical shape to their disagreement: the dog is present because Rupert brings him, yet kept at the edge because Miss Chilmark has made the disruption impossible to ignore.

A declared campaign

The quarrel continues to occupy Miss Chilmark after the first incident. When she emerges from the ladies’ room, she announces that she intends to make a stand on the dog that night. Her plan is conditional but firm: if Marlowe misbehaves, she will tell Rupert to remove him and expects the others to support her. She is not merely objecting in the moment; she is seeking the group’s backing for a rule governing Rupert’s conduct as well as the dog’s place at the meeting.

Jessica’s response makes clear that Miss Chilmark cannot count on unanimous support. Jessica points out that Marlowe had only shaken himself and had not fouled the carpet. Miss Chilmark rejects the comparison as vulgar and returns to the consequences she considers decisive: she was drenched, and the meeting had to be interrupted. In this exchange, the same incident remains differently weighted by the two women: Jessica minimizes the offense by contrasting it with a worse possibility, while Miss Chilmark insists on the actual inconvenience already caused.

The dog’s repeated presence keeps the conflict active rather than settled. Miss Chilmark’s stated intention to confront Rupert gives the earlier complaint a prospective edge, while her expectation that others will support her shows that the dispute has become a matter of group conduct. Rupert is the person she means to confront, but Marlowe is both the immediate cause and the object around which their competing claims are organized.

The near accident and a moment of protection

During a later meeting, Marlowe pads into the circle and leaps onto the chair beside Miss Chilmark. He raises a paw to her chest; as she backs away, the chair tips. Rupert, arriving behind his boisterous pet, darts forward and catches the chair before it hits the floor. His quick action averts an accident, even as the episode heightens Miss Chilmark’s distress and exposes more of her legs than she or the others wanted displayed. Marlowe then jumps down and licks her knee.

Miss Chilmark cries out that the dog is going to bite her and demands that Rupert get him away. Rupert does not leave the dog to respond to his voice: he grabs Marlowe by the scruff and hauls him across the circle. He explains that the animal was showing affection and is frustrated now. The scene sets the characters’ interpretations against each other once more. Rupert reads Marlowe’s approach as affection; Miss Chilmark experiences it as a threat. Yet Rupert’s role is not simply that of the dog’s defender: he also catches her chair, then physically removes the animal when she panics.

An antagonism sustained by humor

The relationship never resolves into agreement about Marlowe. Miss Chilmark continues to regard the dog as a source of disorder and personal discomfort, while Rupert answers with jokes and defenses rather than a lasting promise to keep him away. After she has done something to the dog that leaves Rupert concerned about being banished for the rest of the evening to the Saracen’s Head, he says he would not dare patronize Polly Wycherley. Polly concedes a smile. The remark recasts the dispute as comic social sparring, but its joke depends on the continuing possibility that Miss Chilmark’s objections could get Rupert and Marlowe excluded.

Their exchanges gain much of their comic force from the gap between Rupert’s fond defense of the dog and Miss Chilmark’s insistence on the bodily consequences of having him nearby: wet clothes, wet chairs, a tipped seat, and the fear of a bite. Marlowe is not just a subject they debate; his unruly actions repeatedly interrupt their conversation and force them into direct contact. Rupert’s rescue of the chair briefly interrupts their antagonism without ending it. The relation remains a pattern of complaint, defense, and renewed disturbance, held together by the dog whose presence neither of them can ignore.