on the sobbing,
suffering character before her, defending herself against the dramatist
as against an enemy. He was a liar! There was no wrong in Ben's kiss and
no remorse in her own heart as she remembered the caress. "Even if he
loves me, that doesn't make him horrible!"

The dramatist went remorselessly on. He showed the husband--old, coarse,
brutal. He put him in sharpest relief in order that the woman should be
tempted to her ruin, and in the end the lover--virile, handsome and
unscrupulous--wins the tortured woman's soul--and they flee, leaving the
usual note behind.

"What can you expect?" remarked the cynical friend of the injured
husband. "Given a young and lovely wife like Rose and an old limping
warrior like you, and an elopement follows as a matter of course, Q. E.
D." And so the curtain fell.

Relentless realist in the first act, the dramatist in the second act
began to hedge. He made the life of the erring woman conventionally
miserable. Her lover beat her, neglected her, and finally deserted her.
And in the last act she crawled back into her husband's home like a
starved cat to die, while he, scarred old beast, cried out: "The wages
of sin is death!" Whether the writer intended this scene to be ironical
or not, the effect was to awaken a murmur of laughter among the
ill-restrained of the auditors. But Bertha, hot with anger towards both
author and players, could not join in Mrs. Brent's smiling comment:
"Isn't that comical!"

The doctor coolly said: "A good conventional British ending. Why didn't
he clap a pair of wings on the old reprobate and run him up on a wire,
the way they used to do in translating little Eva in 'Uncle Tom's
Cabin'?"

Afterwards Mrs. Brent proposed that they go to a German restaurant and
have some beer and skittles; but this struck harshly on Bertha, who
still palpitated with the passion of the play. "I reckon we'd better
not. The Captain is pretty tired, and, if you don't mind, we'll quit
now."

Without saying "I've had a lovely time," she shook hands all round, and,
taking her husband's arm, moved off into the street, leaving her hostess
a little uneasy and wholly perplexed. Mrs. Brent's joke about the
Captain and his wife had, as the doctor expressed it, "queered the whole
affair."

"But how did she know?"

"She's a good deal sharper than you gave her credit for being," he
replied. "You Easterners never can learn to take diamonds in the rough."

Bertha's mind was in