“Jimmie—”
“Yes, Baby—dear—”
“Will you wait here till I get into my old rig, then take me for a ride in my new car?”
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]CURTAIN!
MELODRAMA
It consists not in shouts, the leveled gun, the drawn sword, the flashlight in the dark. The quiet moment of decision that means happiness or wreck; the hesitant hand moving toward a doorknob that may open upon joy or the misery of revelation; two people waiting in stillness for the pendulum of uncertainty to swing—that is melodrama as it is played every day within the four walls that enclose your next-door neighbor.
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]CURTAIN!
CHAPTER I—ACT I
John Shakespeare’s son remarked once in a play he lightly invited us to take “As You Like It” that all the world’s a stage. He told us that men and women have their exits and their entrances, that one man in his time plays many parts. But John Shakespeare’s son did not refer to the acts that make up this drama of living. The first act of introduction, the second of conflict, the third of revelation, the fourth of readjustment. Not that all lives can be so simply subdivided. To some dramas there are ten or twelve scenes, swift-changing, tense, terrifying. But whether few or many, live in acts we do—each with its conflict, its climax, each beginning a new problem, a new turn, a new development, until the final curtain is rung down that leaves the house of life in darkness.
Partly because of this and partly because Nancy Bradshaw’s story is essentially of the theater, it seems but natural so to divide the telling of it.