g is commoner in modern house-planning than rooms which have at
least two doors and a French window. We constantly see rooms or halls
which, if transported to the stage, would provide three or four
entrances and exits; and this is even more true of the "central heated"
houses of America than of English houses. The technical purists used
especially to despise the French window--a harmless, agreeable and very
common device. Why the playwright should make "one room one door" an
inexorable canon of art is more than human reason can divine. There are
cases, no doubt, in which probability demands that the dramatist should
be content with one practicable opening to his scene, and should plan
his entrances and exits accordingly. This is no such great feat as might
be imagined. Indeed a playwright will sometimes deliberately place a
particular act in a room with one door, because it happens to facilitate
the movement he desires. It is absurd to lay down any rule in the
matter, other than that the scene should provide a probable locality for
whatever action is to take place in it. I am the last to defend the old
French farce with its ten or a dozen doors through which the characters
kept scuttling in and out like rabbits in a warren. But the fact that we
are tired of conventional laxity is no good reason for rushing to the
other extreme of conventional and hampering austerity.

Similarly, because the forged will and the lost "marriage lines" have
been rightly relegated to melodrama, is there any reason why we should
banish from the stage every form of written document? Mr. Bernard Shaw,
in an article celebrating the advent of the new technique, once wrote,
"Nowadays an actor cannot open a letter or toss off somebody else's
glass of poison without having to face a brutal outburst of jeering."
What an extravagance to bracket as equally exploded absurdities the
opening of a letter and the tossing off of the wrong glass of poison!
Letters--more's the pity--play a gigantic part in the economy of modern
life. The General Post Office is a vast mechanism for the distribution
of tragedy, comedy, melodrama, and farce throughout the country and
throughout the world. To whose door has not Destiny come in the disguise
of a postman, and slipped its decree, with a double rat-tat, into the
letter-box? Whose heart has not sickened as he heard the postman's
footstep pass his door without pausing? Whose hand has not trembled as
he opened a letter? W