Equally is it true that good technic forbids the false lead: any hint or suggestion which has the appearance of conducting on to something to come later in the play, which shall verify and fortify the previous allusion or implication. Every word spoken is thus, besides its immediate significance, a preparation for something ahead. It is a continual temptation to a dramatist with a feeling for character (a gift most admirable in itself) to do brushwork on some person of his play, which, while it may illuminate the character as such, may involve episodic treatment that will entirely mislead an audience into supposing that the author has far more meaning in the action shown than he intended. These false leads are of course always the enemies of unity and to be all the more carefully guarded against in proportion to their attraction. So attractive, indeed, is this lure into by-paths away from the main path of progress that it is fairly astonishing to see how often even veteran playwrights fall in love with some character, disproportionately handle it, and invent unnecessary tangential incidents in order to exhibit it. And, rather discouragingly, an audience forgives episodic treatment and over-emphasis in the enjoyment of the character, as such; willing to let the drama suffer for the sake of a welcome detail. In developing his story in this intermediate part of it, a more insidious, all-pervasive lure is to be seen in the change in the very type of drama intended at first, or clearly promised in act one. The play may start out to be a comedy of character and then be deflected into one where character is lost sight of in the interest of plot; or a play farcical in the conditions given may turn serious on the dramatist's hands. Or, worse yet, that which is a comedy in feeling and drift, may in the course of the development become tragic in conclusion. Or, once more, what begins for tragedy, with its implied seriousness of interest in character and philosophy of life, may resolve itself, under the fascination of plot and of histrionic effectivism, into melodrama, with its undue emphasis upon external sensation and its correlative loss in depth and artistry.