which the
humblest member of an audience feels, without knowing anything of
dramatic law--got the better of three men, trained in dramatic work,
only by sheer force, and against our own determined opposition. We were
three of Stephenson's cows--or shall I say three calves?--standing on
the track, and we could not succeed where Jumbo failed.

The third step, in the changes forced upon us by the laws of dramatic
construction, was a very great one; and it was made necessary by the
fact, just mentioned, that the child, Natalie, had no dramatic function
to fulfill in the protection of her mother's virtue. In other words,
there is no point in the play, now, where sexual love is, or can be,
replaced by maternal love, as the controlling passion of the play.
Consequently, the last two acts in their entirety, so far as the serious
parts are concerned, disappear; one new scene and a new act taking their
place. The sad mother, playing with a little shoe or toy, passes out of
our view. The dying woman, kissing the hand of the man she has wronged;
the husband, awe-stricken in the presence of a mother's child; the child
clasped in Lilian's arms; her last look on earth, a smile, and her last
breath, the final expression of maternal tenderness--these scenes belong
only to the original version of the play, as it lies in its author's
desk. With an author's sensitive interest in his own work, I wasted many
hours in trying to save these scenes. But I was working directly against
the laws of dramatic truth, and I gave up the impossible task.

The fourth great change--forced on us, as the others were--concerns the
character of John Strebelow. As he is now to become the object of a
wife's mature affection, he must not merely be a noble and generous man;
he must do something worthy of the love which is to be bestowed on him.
He must command a woman's love. When, therefore, he hears his wife,
kneeling over her wounded lover, use words which tell him of their
former relations, he does not what most of us would do, but what an
occasional hero among us would do. Of course, the words of Lilian
cannot be such, now, as to close the gates to all hopes of love, as they
were before. She still utters a wild cry, but her words merely show the
awakened tenderness and pity of a woman for a man she had once loved.
They are uttered, however, in the presence of others, and they
compromise her husband's honor. At that moment he takes her gently in
his arms, an