One more example may be given, for these illustrations will bring out more clearly a phase of dramatic writing which has not received overmuch attention in criticism. The recent clever comedy, _Years of Discretion_, by the Hattons, conducts the story to a conventional end, when the middle-aged lovers, who have flirted, danced and motored themselves into an engagement and marriage, are on the eve of their wedding tour. If the story be a love story, and it is in essence, it ought to be over. The staid Boston widow has been metamorphosed by gay New York, her maneuvers have resulted in the traditional end; she has got her man. What else can be offered to hold the interest? And just here is where the authors have been able, passing beyond the conventional limits of story, to introduce, in a lightly touched, pleasing fashion, a bit of philosophy that underlies the drama and gives it an enjoyable fillip at the close. We see the newly wed pair, facing that wedding tour at fifty, and secretly longing to give it up and settle down comfortably at home. They have been playing young during the New York whirl, why not be natural now and enjoy life in the decade to which they belong? So, in the charming garden scene they confess, and agree to grow old gracefully together. It is excellent comedy and sound psychology; to some, the last act is the best of all. Yet, regarded from the act preceding, it seemed superfluous. Still another trouble confronts the playwright as he comes at grapples with the final act. He falls under the temptation to make a conventionally desirable conclusion, the "pleasant ending" already animadverted against, which is supposed to be the constant petition of the theater Philistine. Here, it will be observed, the pleasant ending becomes part of the constructive problem. Shall the playwright carry out the story in a way to make it harmonious with what has gone before, both psychologically and in the logic of events? Shall he make the conclusion congruous with the climax, a properly deduced result from the situation therein shown? If he do, his play will be a work of art, tonal in a totality whose respective parts are keyed to this effect. Or shall he, adopting the tag line familiar to us in fairy tales, "and so they lived happily ever after," wrest and distort his material in order to give this supposed-to-be-prayed-for condiment that the grown-up babes in front are crying for? Every dramatist meets this question face to face in his last act, unless his plan has been to throw his most dramatic moment at the play's very end. A large percentage of all dramas weaken or spoil the effect by this handling of the last part of the play. The ending either is ineffective because unbelievable; or unnecessary, because what it shows had better be left to the imagination.