not husband and wife, or brother and sister, or anything
so simple and old-fashioned as that. She is some one
else's wife. She is _The Wife of the Other Man_. Just
what there is, for the reader, about other men's wives,
I don't understand. I know tons of them that I wouldn't
walk round a block for. But the reading public goes wild
over them. The old-fashioned heroine was unmarried. That
spoiled the whole story. You could see the end from the
beginning. But with Another Man's Wife, the way is blocked.
Something has got to happen that would seem almost obvious
to anyone.

The writer, therefore, at once puts the two snoopos--The
Man and The Woman--into a frightfully indelicate position.
The more indelicate it is, the better. Sometimes she gets
into his motor by accident after the theatre, or they
both engage the drawing-room of a Pullman car by mistake,
or else, best of all, he is brought accidentally into
her room at an hotel at night. There is something about
an hotel room at night, apparently, which throws the
modern reader into convulsions. It is always easy to
arrange a scene of this sort. For example, taking the
sample beginning that I gave above, The Man, whom I left
sitting at the _cabaret_ table, above, rises unsteadily
--it is the recognised way of rising in a _cabaret_--and,
settling the reckoning with the waiter, staggers into
the street. For myself I never do a reckoning with the
waiter. I just pay the bill as he adds it, and take a
chance on it.