vent our feeling impatient. I am not claiming superiority for either
method; I merely point to a good example of two different ways of
attacking the same problem.

In _The Benefit of the Doubt_, by Sir Arthur Pinero, we have a crisply
dramatic opening of the very best type. A few words from a contemporary
criticism may serve to indicate the effect it produced on a first-night
audience--

We are in the thick of the action at once, or at least in the thick
of the interest, so that the exposition, instead of being, so to
speak, a mere platform from which the train is presently to start,
becomes an inseparable part of the movement. The sense of dramatic
irony is strongly and yet delicately suggested. We foresee a
"peripety," apparent prosperity suddenly crumbling into disaster,
within the act itself; and, when it comes, it awakens our sympathy
and redoubles our interest.

Almost the same words might be applied to the opening of _The Climbers_,
by the late Clyde Fitch, one of the many individual scenes which make
one deeply regret that Mr. Fitch did not live to do full justice to his
remarkable talent.

One of the ablest of recent openings is that of Mr. Galsworthy's _Silver
Box_. The curtain rises upon a solid, dull, upper-middle-class
dining-room, empty and silent, the electric lights burning, the tray
with whiskey, siphon and cigarette-box marking the midnight hour. Then
we have the stumbling, fumbling entrance of Jack Barthwick, beatifically
drunk, his maudlin babble, and his ill-omened hospitality to the haggard
loafer who follows at his heels. Another example of a high-pitched
opening scene may be found in Mr. Perceval Landon's _The House
Opposite_. Here we have a midnight parting between a married woman and
her lover, in the middle of which the man, glancing at the lighted
window of the house opposite, sees a figure moving in such a way as to
suggest that a crime is being perpetrated. As a matter of fact, an old
man is murdered, and his housekeeper is accused of the crime. The hero,
if so he can be called, knows that it was a man, not a woman, who was in
the victim's room that night; and the problem is: how can he give his
evidence without betraying a woman's secret by admitting his presence in
her house at midnight? I neither praise nor blame this class of story; I
merely cite the play as one in which we plunge straight into the crisis,
without any introductory period of tranquillity.

The inter