The play gives Pirandello the opportunity to display his knowledge of the sentiments and passions of the modern "high life" individual. Although they talk and act and express familiar sentiment in a way that makes one think they are real people, in reality they are unreal. They are taken from the author's imagination rather than from real life. The second comedy in this volume is much more meritorious than the first. The author portrays characters who well might have existed in the flesh. Gasparina, who has put twenty-seven years of continency behind her and had achieved the direction of a second-class boarding-house, is derided and maltreated by her "guests." The most swagger of her boarders, who has been miraculously saved in a duel which followed a broken engagement, has an original idea. He will make a mock marriage with her and thus establish freedom from further love, annoyance, and duels. She sees in the proposal escape from the boarding-house. In the little villa of the country to which he sends her, under promise that she is not to make herself evident and where he is not to visit her, she blooms like a flower. In due course of time he falls in love again, and in order that he may accomplish matrimony he must free himself from Gasparina. This could be accomplished, as it never was consummated, but the messenger, an old aspirant to her favor, is on the point of having his aspirations realized when the husband in name only sees in Gasparina the woman he really loves. The curtain falls at an opportune moment before any hearts are broken or any blood is shed. It is one of the plays of Pirandello that has had considerable success on the stage. He is in reality a finished workman, an accomplished stylist, a happy colorist, and fecund withal. His most important of the stories are "Erma bifronte" ("Deceitful Hermes"), "La Vita Nuda" ("Naked Life"), "La Trappola" ("The Snare"), "E Domani ... lunedi" ("And To-morrow--Monday"), "Un Cavallo Nella Luna" ("A Horse in the Moon"), "Quand ero matto" ("When I was Crazy"), "Bianche e Nere" ("Blacks and Whites"); his romances, in addition to the ones already mentioned, are "I Vecchi e I Giovani" ("The Old and the Young"), and "Si Gira" ("One Turns"), the most recent and poorest of them. It would be a mistake to convey the impression that Pirandello is universally admired in Italy. His stories and romances have an adventuresome quality that transcend ordinary experience, and his plays attempt to dispense with theatricalness and to substitute for it a subtle analysis of life with corrosive comment, both of which are very much resented.