Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/149

Rh kiss from the maid, and remark that the motor horn that the property man has just tooted sounds like the master's car, and how surprised he will be to learn that the mistress has not been home since she went to the Meadowbrook dance on Wednesday with that dark Mr. Smithers. Yes, it was Wednesday because it was the same night that old man Clitus Coincidence was stabbed to death with the green jade scissors in his study.

When you come to dissect it, I don't know that this is such a marked advance on the soliloquy. Possibly the greatest passage in the drama is a soliloquy. In "What Price Glory", a very fine drama hailed as a masterpiece of the newer realism, the play opens with two runners and an orderly in regimental headquarters. They hold the stage alone for something like five minutes. Their conversation is clever, diverting and shrewdly in character, but for all that, its purpose is merely to prepare the way for the principal characters, and the three promptly fade into the background and remain there when the play really begins. Later in the same drama is a glaring violation of realism. The captain and the sergeant help themselves repeatedly at the bar of the estaminet, with no tally being