false step, and compelled society to reject him. It did not want to do
so; it never does. It is long-suffering; it tries not to see and
acknowledge things until the culprit himself forces it to take action.
Then it says: 'Now you have openly and inconsiderately broken our bond of
mutual forbearance. You make me send you away. Go, then, behind stone
walls, and please do not come to me again. If you do, you will only be a
troublesome ghost. You will cause awkwardness and distress.' So, Mr.
Anson--I must be polite to him--did the most reasonable and proper thing.
He disappeared from the play before it actually became tragedy. There
was no tragedy in his death--death is a magnificent ally; it untangles
knots. The tragedy was in his living--in the perpetual ruin of his
wife's life, renewed every morning. He disappeared. Then the play
became drama, with only a little shadow of tragedy behind it. Now,
frankly, am I not right?"

"Mrs. Falchion," I said, "your argument is clever, but it is only
incidentally true. You draw life, society and men no more correctly than
the author of 'A Sweet Apocalypse' would draw you. The social law you
sketch when reduced to its bare elements, is remorseless. It does not
provide for repentance, for restitution, for recovering a lost paradise.
It makes an act final, a sin irrevocable."

"Well, since we are beginning to talk like a couple of books by a pair of
priggish philosophers, I might as well say that I think sin is final so
far as the domestic and social machinery of the world is concerned. What
his religious belief requires of a man is one thing, what his fellow-men
require of him is another. The world says, You shall have latitude
enough to swing in freely, but you must keep within the code. As soon
as you break the law openly, and set the machinery of public penalty in
motion, there is an end of you, so far as this world is concerned. You