Fate is a careless stage manager. A scene-shifter could give her pointers. Usually her most important strokes lack utterly the element of the dramatic and have the appearance of the common-place. Such ordinary phenomena as missed trains, letters which did not get mailed and slips of the tongue frequently mark the turning points in human lives. A Broadway playwright would protest that there is no "punch" in such things. But in the theater of life the dramatic climaxes are not carefully arranged so that the audience can leave at eleven o'clock. The audience is not considered at all. Neither is the player who is for the moment in the star rôle. His lines are not told him in advance. He steps out before the footlights of life and Fate furnishes him with his cue. But whether, in following it, his actions and lines mark a crisis in the play, whether the critical point was reached in the first or last act, he generally cannot tell. ······· It was a month since Carmelita had taken
