young girl's thoughts? It cannot be that, because the novelists do it.
It is because in a play we must tell nothing that is not revealed by
the spoken words; you must find out all you want to know from them;
there is no weather even in plays nowadays except in melodrama; the
novelist can have sixteen chapters about the hero's grandparents, but
we cannot even say he had any unless he says it himself. There can be
no rummaging in the past for us to show what sort of people our
characters are; we are allowed only to present them as they toe the
mark; then the handkerchief falls, and off they go.

So now we know why we must not spy into Amy's diary. Perhaps we have
not always been such sticklers for the etiquette of the thing; but we
are always sticklers on Thursdays, and this is a Thursday.

As you are to be shown Amy's room, we are permitted to describe it,
though not to tell (which would be much more interesting) why a girl
of seventeen has, as her very own, the chief room of a house. The
moment you open the door of this room (and please, you are not to look
consciously at the escritoire as if you knew the diary was in it) you
are aware, though Amy may not be visible, that there is an uncommonly
clever girl in the house. The door does not always open easily,
because attached thereto is a curtain which frequently catches in it,
and this curtain is hand-sewn (extinct animals); indeed a gifted
woman's touch is everywhere; if you are not hand-sewn you are almost
certainly hand-painted, but incompletely, for Amy in her pursuit of
the arts has often to drop one in order to keep pace with another.
Some of the chairs have escaped as yet, but their time will come. The
table-cover and the curtains are of a lovely pink, perforated
ingeniously with many tiny holes, which when you consider them against
a dark background, gradually assume the appearance of something