But is this treating the play fairly? Is it just a story, the story of Carlotta and Diaz? Suppose we look at it in another way, suppose we consider it as a study of modern love, or, more particularly, of the modern woman in love. Then the play at once looks much more shipshape. It is the _éducation sentimentale_ of Carlotta. The second act ceases to be episodical; it is one of the stages in Carlotta’s “love-life” (as Ibsen’s Ella Rentheim calls it). The miracle of Diaz’s reclamation between the acts ceases to worry us; it only prepares another stage in Carlotta’s love-life. And, from this point of view, I think Mr. Bennett has achieved something much better than the construction of a well-made play. He has given us, in his downright matter-of-fact way, a close study of modern love in the case of a woman made for love, living for it, able to dominate it and to turn it to heroic purpose. She starts her career of love by “giving herself” to a man who is almost a stranger. I suppose this is considered a “bold” scene. But it is, evidently, there from no cheap purpose of “audacity,” it is no calculated fling at the proprieties. Mr. Bennett—it is his way—indifferently depicts human nature as he sees it, and the girl’s “fall” is natural enough. In a _milieu_ of prosaic provincialism (if one may venture so to qualify the Five Towns) she is thrown into contact with a romantic figure from the great world, a famous pianist who has just enraptured her with his music, the embodiment of all her artistic ideals. She is of an amorous temperament (and since Mr. Bennett is undertaking a study of love, it would be no use choosing an ascetic heroine). The inevitable happens. When next seen, she has not seen or heard of the man for years since their one meeting. They have been years of strenuous labour, and she is a successful novelist. But she has not parted with her temperament, and she falls in love with, so to speak, the nearest man. He seems a poor creature for so superior a woman to choose—but such a choice is one of the commonplaces of life. When she realizes the misery she is causing to the man’s wife she promptly renounces him. (The wife has a little past love-history of her own—Mr. Bennett neglects no facet of his subject.) Then Carlotta hears of Diaz and his morphinomania, conceives forthwith her heroic project of rescuing him, takes up her lot with him again, and pulls him through. When he is himself again, he reveals the egoism of the absolute artist. Carlotta must not accompany him to the concert, because she would make him nervous. She obeys, and is left in an agony of suspense at home. When the concert has ended in triumph, he must be off (without his wife) to an influential patron’s party. She acquiesces again, not without tears. The men she loves are not worthy of her; but she must love them, she was made for love. There is talk of marriage at the end. It seems an anti-climax.