e is best indicated by an interact.
When the curtain is down, the action on the stage remains, as it were,
in suspense. The audience lets its attention revert to the affairs of
real life; and it is quite willing, when the mimic world is once more
revealed, to suppose that any reasonable space of time has elapsed while
its thoughts were occupied with other matters. It is much more difficult
for it to accept a wholly imaginary lapse of time while its attention is
centred on the mimic world. Some playwrights have of late years adopted
the device of dropping their curtain once, or even twice, in the middle
of an act, to indicate an interval of a few minutes, or even of an
hour--for instance, of the time between "going in to dinner" and the
return of the ladies to the drawing-room. Sir Arthur Pinero employs this
device with good effect in _Iris_; so does Mr. Granville Barker in
_Waste_, and Mr. Galsworthy in _The Silver Box_. It is certainly far
preferable to that "ideal" treatment of time which was common in the
French drama of the nineteenth century, and survives to this day in
plays adapted or imitated from the French.

I remember seeing in London, not very long ago, a one-act play on the
subject of Rouget de l'Isle. In the space of about half-an-hour, he
handed the manuscript of the "Marseillaise" to an opera-singer whom he
adored, she took it away and sang it at the Opera, it caught the popular
ear from that one performance, and the dying Rouget heard it sung by the
passing multitude in the streets within about fifteen minutes of the
moment when it first left his hands. (The whole piece, I repeat,
occupied about half-an-hour; but as a good deal of that time was devoted
to preliminaries, not more than fifteen minutes can have elapsed between
the time when the cantatrice left Rouget's garret and the time when all
Paris was singing the "Marseillaise.") This is perhaps an extreme
instance of the ideal treatment of time; but one could find numberless
cases in the works of Scribe, Labiche, and others, in which the
transactions of many hours are represented as occurring within the
limits of a single act. Our modern practice eschews such licenses. It
will often compress into an act of half-an-hour more events than would
probably happen in real life in a similar space of time, but not such a
train of occurrences as to transcend the limits of possibility. It must
be remembered, however, that the standard of verisimilitude naturall