The possibility of suspending tension is of wider import than may at first sight appear.  But for it, our dramas would have to be all bone and muscle, like the figures in an anatomical textbook.  As it is, we are able, without relaxing tension, to shift it to various planes of consciousness, and thus find leisure to reproduce the surface aspects of life, with some of its accidents and irrelevances.  For example, when the playwright has, at the end of his first act, succeeded in carrying onward the spectator’s interest, and giving him something definite to look forward to, it does not at all follow that the expected scene, situation, revelation, or what not, should come at the beginning of the second act.  In some cases it must do so; when, as in The Idyll above cited, the spectator has been carefully induced to expect some imminent conjuncture which cannot be postponed.  But this can scarcely be called a typical case.  More commonly, when an author has enlisted the curiosity of his audience of some definite point, he will be in no great hurry to satisfy and dissipate it.  He may devote the early part of the second act to working-up the same line of interest to a higher pitch; or he may hold it in suspense while he prepares some further development of the action.  The closeness with which a line of interest, once started, ought to be followed up, must depend in some measure on the nature and tone of the play.  If it be a serious play, in which character and action are very closely intertwined, any pause or break in the conjoint development is to be avoided.  If, on the other hand, it is a play of light and graceful dialogue, in which the action is a pretext for setting the characters in motion rather than the chief means towards their manifestation, then the playwright can afford to relax the rate of his progress, and even to wander a little from the straight line of advance.  In such a play, even the old institution of the “underplot” is not inadmissible; though the underplot ought scarcely to be a “plot,” but only some very slight thread of interest, involving no strain on the attention.[2] It may almost be called an established practice, on the English stage, to let the dalliance of a pair of boy-and-girl lovers relieve the main interest of a more or less serious comedy; and there is no particular harm in such a convention, if it be not out of keeping with the general character of the play.  In some plays the substance—­the character-action, if one may so call it—­is the main, and indeed the only, thing.  In others the substance, though never unimportant, is in some degree subordinate to the embroideries; and it is for the playwright to judge how far this subordination may safely be carried.