if intelligent, feels that he has paid too high
a price for such a union. I am not arguing that the improbable may not
be legitimate on the stage; but only trying to point out that, in this
particular case, the key of the play, established in previous acts, is
the key of probability; and hence the change is a sin against artistic
probity. The key of improbability, as in some excellent farces, _Baby
Mine_, _Seven Days_, _Seven Keys to Baldpate_, and their kind--where it
is basal that we grant certain conditions or happenings not at all
likely in life--is quite another matter and not of necessity
reprehensible in the least. But _Merely Mary Ann_ is too true in its
homely fashion to fob us off with lies at the end; we believed it at
first and so are shocked at its mendacity.

One of the best melodramas of recent years is Mr. McLellan's _Leah
Kleschna_. Its psychology, founded on the assumption that a woman whose
higher nature is appealed to, will respond to the appeal, is as sound as
it is fine and encouraging. She is a criminal who is caught opening a
safe by the French statesman whose house she has entered. His
conversation with her is so effective that she breaks with her fellow
thieves and starts in on another and better life in a foreign country,
where the statesman secures for her honest employment.

It is in the last act that the playwright gets into trouble, and
illustrates the second possibility just mentioned; unnecessary
information which can readily be filled in by the spectator, without the
addition of a superfluous act to show it. The woman has broken with her
gang, she is saved; arrangement has been made for her to go to Austria
(if my memory locates the land), there to work out her change of heart.
Really, there is nothing else to tell. The essential interest of the
play lay in the reclaiming of Leah; she is reclaimed! Why not dismiss
the audience? But the author, perhaps led astray by the principle of
showing things on the stage, even if the things shown lie beyond the
limits of the story proper, exhibits the girl in her new quarters, aided
and abetted by the scene painter who places behind her a very expensive
background of Nature; and then caps his unnecessary work by bringing the
statesman on a visit to see how his protegee is getting along.
Meanwhile, the knowing spectator murmurs in his seat (let us hope) and
kicks against the pricks of convention.

These examples indicate some of the problems cent