He builds two ends of the bridge, in the incident of the
cheque-book at the close of the one act, and in the state of hebetude in
which we find her at the opening of the other; but there remains a great
gap at which the imagination boggles. The author has tried to throw a
retrospective footway across it in Iris's confession to Trenwith in the
fifth act; but I do not find that it quite meets the case. It would no
doubt have been very difficult to keep the action within reasonable
limits had a new act taken the place of the existing fourth; but Sir
Arthur Pinero would probably have produced a completer work of art had
he faced this difficulty, and contrived to compress into a single last
act something like the matter of the existing fourth and fifth. It may
be that he deliberately preferred that Iris should give in narrative the
history of her decline; but I do not consider this a case in support of
that slight plea for impassioned narrative which I ventured to put forth
a few pages back.
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