between his lovers, without rendering his heroine entirely unsympathetic, or presenting her in the guise of a bewildering moral anomaly.  Thirdly, he transferred the scene of the peripety from a court of justice, with its difficult adjuncts and tedious procedure, to the private study of a great lawyer.  At the opening of the scene between Mrs. Dane and Sir Daniel Carteret, she is, no doubt, still anxious and ill-at-ease, but reasonably confident of having averted all danger of exposure.  Sir Daniel, too (like Sir Charles Russell in the pearl suit), is practically convinced of her innocence.  He merely wants to get the case absolutely clear, for the final confounding of her accusers.  At first, all goes smoothly.  Mrs. Dane’s answers to his questions are pat and plausible.  Then she makes a single, almost imperceptible, slip of the tongue:  she says, “We had governesses,” instead of “I had governesses.”  Sir Daniel pricks up his ears:  “We?  You say you were an only child.  Who’s we?” “My cousin and I,” she answers.  Sir Daniel thinks it odd that he has not heard of this cousin before; but he continues his interrogatory without serious suspicion.  Then it occurs to him to look up, in a topographical dictionary, the little town of Tawhampton, where Mrs. Dane spent her youth.  He reads the bald account of it, ending thus, “The living is a Vicarage, net yearly value L376, and has been held since 1875 by”—­and he turns round upon her—­“by the Rev. Francis Hindemarsh!  Hindemarsh?”

  Mrs. Dane:  He was my uncle.

  Sir Daniel:  Your uncle?

  Mrs. Dane:  Sir Daniel, I’ve done wrong to hide from you that Felicia
  Hindemarsh was my cousin.

  Sir Daniel:  Felicia Hindemarsh was your cousin!

  Mrs. Dane:  Can’t you understand why I have hidden it?  The whole
  affair was so terrible.

And so she stumbles on, from one inevitable admission to another, until the damning truth is clear that she herself is Felicia Hindemarsh, the central, though not the most guilty, figure in a horrible scandal.

This scene is worthy of study as an excellent type of what may be called the judicial peripety, the crushing cross-examination, in which it is possible to combine the tension of the detective story with no small psychological subtlety.  In Mr. Jones’s scene, the psychology is obvious enough; but it is an admirable example of nice adjustment without any obtrusive ingenuity.  The whole drama, in short, up to the last act is, in the exact sense of the word, a well-made play—­complex yet clear, ingenious yet natural.  In the comparative weakness of the last act we have a common characteristic of latter-day drama, which will have to be discussed in due course.

In this case we have a peripety of external fortune.  For a clearly-marked moral peripety we may turn to the great scene between Vivie and her mother in the second act of Mrs. Warren’s Profession. Whatever may be thought of the matter of this scene, its movement is excellent.  After a short, sharp opening, which reveals to Mrs. Warren the unfilial dispositions of her daughter, and reduces her to whimpering dismay, the following little passage occurs: