Giulietta, the ward of David Pennycuick, goes to study singing at Milan.  Mr. Harry Rook, Pennycuick’s most intimate friend, meets her by chance in Milan, and she becomes his mistress, neither having the least idea that the other knows Pennycuick.  Then Viscount Hintlesham, like Pennycuick, a dupe of Rook’s, meets her by chance at Monte Carlo and falls in love with her.  He does not know that she knows Rook or Pennycuick, and she does not know that he knows them.  Arriving in England, she finds in the manager, the promoter, and the chairman of the Electric White Lead Company her guardian, her seducer, and her lover.  When she comes to see her guardian, the first person she meets is her seducer, and she learns that her lover has just left the house.  Up to that moment, I repeat, she did not know that any one of these men knew any other; yet she does not even say, “How small the world is!"[4] Surely some such observation was obligatory under the circumstances.

Let us turn now to a more memorable piece of work; that interesting play of Sir Arthur Pinero’s transition period, The Profligate.  Here the great situation of the third act is brought about by a chain of coincidences which would be utterly unthinkable in the author’s maturer work.  Leslie Brudenell, the heroine, is the ward of Mr. Cheal, a solicitor.  She is to be married to Dunstan Renshaw; and, as she has no home, the bridal party meets at Mr. Cheal’s office before proceeding to the registrar’s.  No sooner have they departed than Janet Preece, who has been betrayed and deserted by Dunstan Renshaw (under an assumed name) comes to the office to state her piteous case.  This is not in itself a pure coincidence; for Janet happened to come to London in the same train with Leslie Brudenell and her brother Wilfrid; and Wilfrid, seeing in her a damsel in distress, recommended her to lay her troubles before a respectable solicitor, giving her Mr. Cheal’s address.  So far, then, the coincidence is not startling.  It is natural enough that Renshaw’s mistress and his betrothed should live in the same country town; and it is not improbable that they should come to London by the same train, and that Wilfrid Brudenell should give the bewildered and weeping young woman a commonplace piece of advice.  The concatenation of circumstances is remarkable rather than improbable.  But when, in the next act, not a month later, Janet Preece, by pure chance, drops in at the Florentine villa where Renshaw and Leslie are spending their honeymoon, we feel that the long arm of coincidence is stretched to its uttermost, and that even the thrilling situation which follows is very dearly bought.  It would not have been difficult to attenuate the coincidence.  What has actually happened is this:  Janet has (we know not how) become a sort of maid-companion to a Mrs. Stonehay, whose daughter was a school-friend of Leslie’s; the Stonehays have come to Florence, knowing nothing of Leslie’s presence there;