As Lilian is to live, which of the two men who love her is to die? There
are axioms among the laws of dramatic construction, as in mathematics.
One of them is this--three hearts cannot beat as one. The world is not
large enough, from an artistic point of view, for three good human
hearts to continue to exist, if two of them love the third. If one of
the two hearts is a bad one, art assigns it to the hell on earth of
disappointed love; but if it is good and tender and gentle, art is
merciful to it, and puts it out of its misery by death. Routledge was
wounded in a duel. Strebelow was supposed to be lost in the wreck of a
steamer. It was easy enough to kill either of them, but which? We argued
this question for three weeks. Mere romance was on the side of the
young artist. But to have had him live would have robbed the play of all
its meaning. Its moral, in the original form, is this: It is a dangerous
thing to marry, for any reason, without the safeguard of love, even when
the person one marries is worthy of one's love in every possible way. If
we had decided in favor of Routledge, the play would have had no moral
at all, or rather a very bad one. If a girl marries the wrong man, she
need only wait for him to die; and if her lover waits, too, it'll be all
right. If, on the other hand, we so reconstruct the whole play that the
husband and wife may at last come together with true affection, we shall
have the moral: Even if a young girl makes the worst of all mistakes,
and accepts the hand of one man when her heart belongs to another,
fidelity to the duty of a wife on her side, and a manly, generous
confidence on the part of her husband, may, in the end, correct even
such a mistake. The dignity of this moral saved John Strebelow's life,
and Harold Routledge was killed in the duel with the Count de Carojac.

All that was needed to affect this first change in the play was to
instruct the actor who played Routledge to lie still when the curtain
fell at the end of the third act, and to go home afterward. But there