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.
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