The mechanical round of life re-asserts its hold upon them.
"Help me with my cloak," she says; and he holds her mantle for her, and
tucks in the puffed sleeves of her blouse. Then he takes up the lamp and
lights her out--and the curtain falls. A model "curtain"!
* * * * *
[Footnote 1: The fact that a great poet can ignore such precepts with
impunity is proved by the exquisite anticlimax of the third act of
D'Annunzio's _La Gioconda_.]
_CHAPTER XIX_
CONVERSION
The reader may have noticed, possibly with surprise, that some of the
stock terms of dramatic criticism occur but rarely in these pages, or
not at all. One of them is _denouement_. According to orthodox theory, I
ought to have made the _denouement_ the subject of a whole chapter, if
not of a whole book. Why have I not done so?
For two reasons. The lesser, but not negligible, reason is that we
possess no convenient English word for the unknotting or disentangling
of a complication.
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