could have seen in them to induce her to marry them is indeed a

mystery.
The adventuress dresses magnificently. Where she gets the money from

we never could understand, for she and her companions are always more
or less complaining of being "stone broke." Dressmakers must be a

trusting people where she comes from.
The adventuress is like the proverbial cat as regards the number of

lives she is possessed of. You never know when she is really dead.
Most people like to die once and have done with it, but the

adventuress, after once or twice trying it, seems to get quite to like
it, and goes on giving way to it, and then it grows upon her until she

can't help herself, and it becomes a sort of craving with her.
This habit of hers is, however, a very trying one for her friends and

husbands--it makes things so uncertain. Something ought to be done to
break her of it. Her husbands, on hearing that she is dead, go into

raptures and rush off and marry other people, and then just as they
are starting off on their new honeymoon up she crops again, as fresh

as paint. It is really most annoying.
For ourselves, were we the husband of a stage adventuress we should

never, after what we have seen of the species, feel quite justified in
believing her to be dead unless we had killed and buried her

ourselves; and even then we should be more easy in our minds if we
could arrange to sit on her grave for a week or so afterward. These

women are so artful!
But it is not only the adventuress who will persist in coming to life

again every time she is slaughtered. They all do it on the stage.
They are all so unreliable in this respect. It must be most

disheartening to the murderers.
And then, again, it is something extraordinary, when you come to think

of it, what a tremendousamount of killing some of them can stand and
still come up smiling in the next act, not a penny the worse for it.

They get stabbed, and shot, and thrown over precipices thousands of
feet high and, bless you, it does them good--it is like a tonic to

them.
As for the young man that is coming home to see his girl, you simply

can't kill him. Achilles was a summer rose compared with him. Nature
and mankind have not sufficient materials in hand as yet to kill that

man. Science has but the strength of a puling babe against his
invulnerability. You can waste your time on earthquakes and

shipwrecks, volcanic eruptions, floods, explosions, railway accidents,
and such like sort of things, if you are foolish enough to do so; but

it is no good your imagining that anything of the kind can hurt him,
because it can't.

There will be thousands of people killed, thousands in each instance,
but one human being will always escape, and that one human being will

be the stage young man who is coming home to see his girl.
He is forever being reported as dead, but it always turns out to be

another fellow who was like him or who had on his (the young man's)
hat. He is bound to be out of it, whoever else may be in.

"If I had been at my post that day," he explains to his sobbing
mother, "I should have been blown up, but the Providence that watches

over good men had ordained that I should be laying blind drunk in
Blogg's saloon at the time the explosion took place, and so the other

engineer, who had been doing my work when it was his turn to be off,
was killed along with the whole of the crew."

"Ah, thank Heaven, thank Heaven for that!" ejaculates the pious old
lady, and the comic man is so overcome with devout joy that he has to

relieve his overstrained heart by drawing his young woman on one side
and grossly insulting her.

All attempts to kill this young man ought really to be given up now.
The job has been tried over and over again by villains and bad people

of all kinds, but no one has ever succeeded. There has been an amount
of energy and ingenuity expended in seeking to lay up that one man

which, properly utilized, might have finished off ten million ordinary
mortals. It is sad to think of so much wasted effort.

He, the young man coming home to see his girl, need never take an
insurance ticket or even buy a _Tit Bits_. It would be needless

expenditure in his case.
On the other hand, and to make matters equal, as it were, there are

some stage people so delicate that it is next door to impossible to
keep them alive.

The inconvenient husband is a most pathetic example of this. Medical
science is powerless to save that man when the last act comes round;

indeed, we doubt whether medical science, in its present state of
development, could even tell what is the matter with him or why he

dies at all. He looks healthy and robust enough and nobody touches
him, yet down he drops, without a word of warning, stone-dead, in the

middle of the floor--he always dies in the middle of the floor. Some
folks like to die in bed, but stage people don't. They like to die on

the floor. We all have our different tastes.
The adventuress herself is another person who dies with remarkable

ease. We suppose in her case it is being so used to it that makes her
so quick and clever at it. There is no lingering illness and doctors'

bills and upsetting of the whole household arrangements about her
method. One walk round the stage and the thing is done.

All bad characters die quickly on the stage. Good characters take a
long time over it, and have a sofa down in the drawing-room to do it

on, and have sobbing relatives and good old doctors fooling around
them, and can smile and forgive everybody. Bad stage characters have

to do the whole job, dying speech and all, in about ten seconds, and
do it with all their clothes on into the bargain, which must make it

most uncomfortable.
It is repentance" target="_blank" title="n.悔悟，悔改；忏悔">repentance that kills off the bad people in plays. They always

repent, and the moment they repent they die. Repentance on the stage
seems to be one of the most dangerous things a man can be taken with.

Our advice to stage wicked people would undoubtedly be, "Never repent.
If you value your life, don't repent. It always means sudden death!"

To return to our adventuress. She is by no means a bad woman. There
is much good in her. This is more than proved by the fact that she

learns to love the hero before she dies; for no one but a really good
woman capable of extraordinarypatience and gentleness could ever, we

are convinced, grow to feel any other sentiment for that irritating
ass, than a desire to throw bricks at him.

The stage adventuress would be a much better woman, too, if it were
not for the heroine. The adventuress makes the most complete

arrangements for being noble and self-sacrificing--that is, for going
away and never coming back, and is just about to carry them out, when

the heroine, who has a perfect genius for being in the wrong place at
the right time, comes in and spoils it all. No stage adventuress can

be good while the heroine is about. The sight of the heroine rouses
every bad feeling in her breast.

We can sympathize with her in this respect. The heroine often affects
ourselves in precisely the same way.

There is a good deal to be said in favor of the adventuress. True,
she possesses rather too much sarcasm and repartee to make things

quite agreeable round the domestichearth, and when she has got all
her clothes on there is not much room left in the place for anybody

else; but taken on the whole she is decidedlyattractive. She has
grit and go in her. She is alive. She can do something to help

herself besides calling for "George."
She has not got a stage child--if she ever had one, she has left it on

somebody else's doorstep which, presuming there was no water handy to
drown it in, seems to be about the most sensible thing she could have

done with it. She is not oppressively good.