ble people from the Bayswater point
of view. But Bayswater would not be the abode of peace it is had it not
been for such.

Have we not placed sexual love on a pedestal higher than it deserves? It
is a noble passion, but it is not the noblest. There is a wider love by
the side of which it is but as the lamp illumining the cottage, to the
moonlight bathing the hills and valleys. There were two women once.
This is a play I saw acted in the daylight. They had been friends from
girlhood, till there came between them the usual trouble--a man. A weak,
pretty creature not worth a thought from either of them; but women love
the unworthy; there would be no over-population problem did they not;
and this poor specimen, ill-luck had ordained they should contend for.

Their rivalry brought out all that was worst in both of them. It is
a mistake to suppose love only elevates; it can debase. It was a
mean struggle for what to an onlooker must have appeared a remarkably
unsatisfying prize. The loser might well have left the conqueror to her
poor triumph, even granting it had been gained unfairly. But the
old, ugly, primeval passions had been stirred in these women, and the
wedding-bells closed only the first act.

The second is not difficult to guess. It would have ended in the Divorce
Court had not the deserted wife felt that a finer revenge would be
secured to her by silence.

In the third, after an interval of only eighteen months, the man
died--the first piece of good fortune that seems to have occurred to
him personally throughout the play. His position must have been
an exceedingly anxious one from the beginning. Notwithstanding his
flabbiness, one cannot but regard him with a certain amount of pity--not
unmixed with amusement. Most of life's dramas can be viewed as either
farce or tragedy according to the whim of the spectator. The actors
invariably play them as tragedy; but then that is the essence of good
farce acting.

Thus was secured the triumph of legal virtue and the punishment of
irregularity, and the play might be dismissed as uninterestingly
orthodox were it not for the fourth act, showing how the wronged wife
came to the woman she had once wronged to ask and grant forgiveness.
Strangely as it may sound, they found their love for one another
unchanged. They had been long parted: it was sweet to hold each other's
hands again. Two lonely women, they agreed to live together. Those
who knew them well in this later ti