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Updated: May 29, 2025
The order had been given to Sir Francis Letchmere's valet that he was to bring over to the Salle de Jeux any telegram or 'phone message that might arrive. Larssen was keenly interested in the throng of smart men and women clustered around the tables. Here was the raw material of his craft human nature. Moths around a candle well, he himself had lit many candles.
On the other hand, if we turn to Letty, the chance which, in the third act, leads Letchmere's party and Mandeville's party to choose the same restaurant, seems to me entirely justified. Entirely to eliminate chance from our representation of life would be a very unreasonable austerity.
In the first act of Letty, Sir Arthur Pinero gains a memorable effect by keeping a secret, not very long, indeed, but long enough and carefully enough to show that he knew very clearly what he was doing. We are introduced to Nevill Letchmere's bachelor apartments.
"Twins are always hateful in a room, because they sit together and chorus their comments together, just as if they were one mind with two bodies. You feel as if you ought to split yourself in two and devote half to each, so as not to cause jealousy. But twin old maids are especially hateful." "A very old family," was Letchmere's comment. "They go back to Henry VII."
He had a keen appreciation of the value of silence in business negotiations. He poured himself out another glass of cognac and drank it off. His attitude conveyed a contempt for Letchmere's cautiousness which he would be too polite to put into words. "If you'd sooner write to Clifford and have his agreement to the scheme in black and white ..." was his studiously, chilly reply.
This "epilogue" so the author calls it has been denounced as a concession to popular sentimentality, and an unpardonable anticlimax. An anticlimax it is, beyond all doubt; but it does not follow that it is an artistic blemish. Nothing would have been easier than not to write it to make the play end with Letty's awakening from her dream, and her flight from Letchmere's rooms.
It would have been the most natural thing in the world for either the sister or the brother-in-law, concerned about their own matrimonial difficulties, to let fall some passing allusion to Letchmere's separation from his wife; but the author carefully avoided this, carefully allowed us to make our first acquaintance with Letty in ignorance of the irony of her position, and then allowed the truth to slip out just in time to let us feel the whole force of that irony during the last scene of the act and the greater part of the second act.
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