In a very different type of play, we find another example of the ignoring of a dramatically obligatory scene.  The author of that charming fantasy, The Passing of the Third Floor Back, was long ago guilty of a play named The Rise of Dick Halward, chiefly memorable for having elicited from Mr. Bernard Shaw one of the most brilliant pages in English dramatic criticism.  The hero of this play, after an adventurous youth in Mexico, has gone to the bar, but gets no briefs, and is therefore unable to marry a lady who announces that no suitor need apply who has less than L5000 a year.  One fine day Dick receives from Mexico the will of an old comrade, which purports to leave to him, absolutely, half a million dollars, gold; but the will is accompanied by a letter, in which the old comrade states that the property is really left to him only in trust for the testator’s long-lost son, whom Dick is enjoined to search out and endow with a capital which, at 5 per cent, represents accurately the desiderated L5000 a year.  As a matter of fact (but this is not to our present purpose), the long-lost son is actually, at that moment, sharing Dick’s chambers in the Temple.  Dick, however, does not know this, and cannot resist the temptation to destroy the old miner’s letter, and grab the property.  We know, of course, that retribution is bound to descend upon him; but does not dramatic effect imperatively require that, for a brief space at any rate, he should be seen—­with whatever qualms of conscience his nature might dictate—­enjoying his ill-gotten wealth?  Mr. Jerome, however, baulks us of this just expectation.  In the very first scene of the second act we find that the game is up.  The deceased miner wrote his letter to Dick seated in the doorway of a hut; a chance photographer took a snap-shot at him; and on returning to England, the chance photographer has nothing more pressing to do than to chance upon the one man who knows the long-lost son, and to show him the photograph of the dying miner, whom he at once recognizes.  By aid of a microscope, the letter he is writing can be deciphered, and thus Dick’s fraud is brought home to him.  Now one would suppose that an author who had invented this monstrous and staggering concatenation of chances, must hope to justify it by some highly dramatic situation, in the obvious and commonplace sense of the word.  It is not difficult, indeed, to foresee such a situation, in which Dick Halward should be confronted, as if by magic, with the very words of the letter he has so carefully destroyed.  I am far from saying that this scene would, in fact, have justified its amazing antecedents; but it would have shown a realization on the author’s part that he must at any rate attempt some effect proportionate to the strain he had placed upon our credulity.  Mr. Jerome showed no such realization.  He made the man who handed Dick the copy of the letter explain beforehand how it had been obtained; so that Dick, though doubtless surprised and disgusted, was not in the least thunderstruck, and manifested no emotion.  Here, then, Mr. Jerome evidently missed a scene rendered obligatory by the law of the maximum of specifically dramatic effect.