xcept when their excesses can be concealed. Is it any
wonder that I am driven to offer to young people in our suburbs the
desperate advice: Do something that will get you into trouble? But
please do not suppose that I defend a state of things which makes such
advice the best that can be given under the circumstances, or that I do
not know how difficult it is to find out a way of getting into trouble
that will combine loss of respectability with integrity of self-respect
and reasonable consideration for other peoples' feelings and interests
on every point except their dread of losing their own respectability.
But when there's a will there's a way. I hate to see dead people walking
about: it is unnatural. And our respectable middle class people are all
as dead as mutton. Out of the mouth of Mrs Knox I have delivered on them
the judgment of her God.

The critics whom I have lampooned in the induction to this play under
the names of Trotter, Vaughan, and Gunn will forgive me: in fact Mr
Trotter forgave me beforehand, and assisted the make-up by which Mr
Claude King so successfully simulated his personal appearance. The
critics whom I did not introduce were somewhat hurt, as I should have
been myself under the same circumstances; but I had not room for them
all; so I can only apologize and assure them that I meant no disrespect.

The concealment of the authorship, if a _secret de Polichinelle_ can be
said to involve concealment, was a necessary part of the play. In so far
as it was effectual, it operated as a measure of relief to those critics
and playgoers who are so obsessed by my strained legendary reputation
that they approach my plays in a condition which is really one of
derangement, and are quite unable to conceive a play of mine as anything
but a trap baited with paradoxes, and designed to compass their ethical
perversion and intellectual confusion. If it were possible, I should put
forward all my plays anonymously, or hire some less disturbing person,
as Bacon is said to have hired Shakespear, to father my plays for me.

Fanny's First Play was performed for the first time at the Little
Theatre in the Adelphi, London, on the afternoon of Wednesday, April
19th 1911.

FANNY'S FIRST PLAY

INDUCTION

_The end of a saloon in an old-fashioned country house (Florence Towers,
the property of Count O'Dowda) has been curtained off to form a stage
for a private theatrical performance. A footman in grandiose