It
would then have been perfectly natural and probable that, not foreseeing
her misunderstanding, he should hurry off without waiting to explain
matters to her. But that he should deliberately leave her in her
delusion, and even use phrases carefully calculated to deceive both her
and the audience,[1] would be, in a writer who professed to place reason
above caprice, a rather gross fault of art.
Mr. Henry Arthur Jones's light comedy, _Whitewashing Julia_, proves that
it is possible, without incurring disaster, to keep a secret throughout
a play, and never reveal it at all. More accurately, what Mr. Jones does
is to pretend that there is some explanation of Mrs. Julia Wren's
relations with the Duke of Savona, other than the simple explanation
that she was his mistress, and to keep us waiting for this
"whitewashing" disclosure, when in fact he has nothing of the sort up
his sleeve, and the plain truth is precisely what the gossips of
Shanctonbury surmise. Julia does not even explain or justify her conduct
from her own point of view.
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