"Intermezzo" (_Zwischenspiel_) might be interpreted as an attack on those new marital conventions which abolish the old-fashioned demand for mutual faithfulness and substitute mutual frankness. It would be more correct, however, to characterize it as a discussion of what constitutes true honesty in the ever delicate relationship between husband and wife. It shows, too, the growth of a woman's soul, once she has been forced to stand on her own feet. Viewed from this point, the play might very well be classified as feministic. It would be easy, for one thing, to read into it a plea for a single moral standard. But its ultimate bearing goes far beyond such a narrow construction. Here as elsewhere, Schnitzler shows himself more sympathetic toward the female than toward the male outlook on life, and the creator of _Cecilia Adams-Ortenburg_ may well be proclaimed one of the foremost living painters of the woman soul. The man who, in "Anatol," saw nothing but a rather weak-minded restlessness in woman's inconstancy, recognizes in "Intermezzo" woman's right to as complete a knowledge of life and its possibilities as any man may acquire. The same note is struck by _Johanna_ in "The Lonely Way." "I want a time to come when I must shudder at myself--shudder as deeply as you can only when nothing has been left untried," she says to _Sala_ in the fourth act. This note sounds much more clearly--one might say defiantly--through the last two acts of "Intermezzo." And when _Amadeus_, shrinking from its implications, cries to _Cecilia_ that thereafter she will be guarded by his tenderness, she retorts impatiently: "But I don't want to be guarded! I shall no longer permit you to guard me!" In strict keeping with it is also that Schnitzler here realizes and accepts woman's capacity for and right to creative expression. It is from _Cecilia's_ lips that the suggestion comes to seek a remedy for life's hurts in a passionate abandonment to work. In fact, the established attitudes of man and woman seem almost reversed in the cases of _Amadeus_ and _Cecilia._