kill either of them, but which? We argued
this question for three weeks. Mere romance was on the side of the
young artist. But to have had him live would have robbed the play of all
its meaning. Its moral, in the original form, is this: It is a dangerous
thing to marry, for any reason, without the safeguard of love, even when
the person one marries is worthy of one's love in every possible way. If
we had decided in favor of Routledge, the play would have had no moral
at all, or rather a very bad one. If a girl marries the wrong man, she
need only wait for him to die; and if her lover waits, too, it'll be all
right. If, on the other hand, we so reconstruct the whole play that the
husband and wife may at last come together with true affection, we shall
have the moral: Even if a young girl makes the worst of all mistakes,
and accepts the hand of one man when her heart belongs to another,
fidelity to the duty of a wife on her side, and a manly, generous
confidence on the part of her husband, may, in the end, correct even
such a mistake. The dignity of this moral saved John Strebelow's life,
and Harold Routledge was killed in the duel with the Count de Carojac.

All that was needed to affect this first change in the play was to
instruct the actor who played Routledge to lie still when the curtain
fell at the end of the third act, and to go home afterward. But there
are a number of problems under the laws of dramatic construction which
we must solve before the play can now be made to reach the hearts of an
audience as it did before. Let us see what they are.

The love of Lilian for Harold Routledge cannot now be the one grand
passion of her life. It must be the love of a young girl, however
sincere and intense, which yields, afterward, to the stronger and deeper
love of a woman for her husband. The next great change, therefore, which
the laws of dramatic construction forced upon us was this: Lilian must
now control her own passion, and when she meets her lover in the second
act she must not depend for her moral safety on the awakening of a
mother's love by the appearance of her child. Her love for Harold is no
longer such an all-controlling force as will justify a woman--justify
her dramatically, I mean--yielding to it. For her to depend on an
outside influence would be to show a weakness of character that would
make her uninteresting. Instead, therefore, of receiving her former
lover with dangerous pent-up fires, Lilian now