It is in the last act that the playwright gets into trouble, and illustrates the second possibility just mentioned; unnecessary information which can readily be filled in by the spectator, without the addition of a superfluous act to show it. The woman has broken with her gang, she is saved; arrangement has been made for her to go to Austria (if my memory locates the land), there to work out her change of heart. Really, there is nothing else to tell. The essential interest of the play lay in the reclaiming of Leah; she is reclaimed! Why not dismiss the audience? But the author, perhaps led astray by the principle of showing things on the stage, even if the things shown lie beyond the limits of the story proper, exhibits the girl in her new quarters, aided and abetted by the scene painter who places behind her a very expensive background of Nature; and then caps his unnecessary work by bringing the statesman on a visit to see how his protegee is getting along. Meanwhile, the knowing spectator murmurs in his seat (let us hope) and kicks against the pricks of convention. These examples indicate some of the problems centering in an act which for the very reason that it is, or seems, comparatively unimportant, is all the more likely to trip up a dramatist who, buoyed up by his victory in a fine and effective scene of climactic force, comes to the final act in a state of reaction, and forgetful of the fact that pride goeth before a fall--the fall of the curtain! No wonder that, in order to dodge all such difficulties, playwrights sometimes project their climax forward into the last act and so shorten what is left to do thereafter; or, going further, place it at the play's terminal point. But the artistic objections to this have been explained. Some treatment of the falling action after the climax, longer or shorter, is advisable; and the dramatist must sharpen his wits upon this technical demand and make it part of the satisfaction of his art to meet it.