e of all
kinds, but no one has ever succeeded. There has been an amount of energy
and ingenuity expended in seeking to lay up that one man which, properly
utilized, might have finished off ten million ordinary mortals. It is
sad to think of so much wasted effort.

He, the young man coming home to see his girl, need never take an
insurance ticket or even buy a _Tit Bits_. It would be needless
expenditure in his case.

On the other hand, and to make matters equal, as it were, there are some
stage people so delicate that it is next door to impossible to keep them
alive.

The inconvenient husband is a most pathetic example of this. Medical
science is powerless to save that man when the last act comes round;
indeed, we doubt whether medical science, in its present state of
development, could even tell what is the matter with him or why he dies
at all. He looks healthy and robust enough and nobody touches him, yet
down he drops, without a word of warning, stone-dead, in the middle of
the floor--he always dies in the middle of the floor. Some folks like
to die in bed, but stage people don't. They like to die on the floor. We
all have our different tastes.

The adventuress herself is another person who dies with remarkable ease.
We suppose in her case it is being so used to it that makes her so quick
and clever at it. There is no lingering illness and doctors' bills and
upsetting of the whole household arrangements about her method. One walk
round the stage and the thing is done.

All bad characters die quickly on the stage. Good characters take a long
time over it, and have a sofa down in the drawing-room to do it on, and
have sobbing relatives and good old doctors fooling around them, and can
smile and forgive everybody. Bad stage characters have to do the whole
job, dying speech and all, in about ten seconds, and do it with
all their clothes on into the bargain, which must make it most
uncomfortable.

It is repentance that kills off the bad people in plays. They always
repent, and the moment they repent they die. Repentance on the stage
seems to be one of the most dangerous things a man can be taken with.
Our advice to stage wicked people would undoubtedly be, "Never repent.
If you value your life, don't repent. It always means sudden death!"

To return to our adventuress. She is by no means a bad woman. There is
much good in her. This is more than proved by the fact that she learns
to love the hero before she dies;