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There was the same fictitious glitter, the same fragility of spurious jewels. They talked of nothing but masked balls and theatres. And Marie Laurent? Oh! Marie Laurent!" The actors' doublets, the embroidered costumes of the queens of melodrama, appeared before them in the white light of the necklaces forming beneath their fingers. In summer the work was less pressing. It was the dull season.
The man's moment had come, and he was minded not to miss a jot of his triumph. His figure seemed to expand, his eye kindled, his voice rang with pride. It was melodrama of the best kind and he fairly rolled it round his tongue. I don't think I grudged it him, for I was fingering something in my pocket. He had won all right, but he wouldn't enjoy his victory long, for soon I would shoot him.
All of these young people looked upon an afternoon a week in the gallery of a Halsted Street theater as their one opportunity to see life. The sort of melodrama they see there has recently been described as "the ten commandments written in red fire."
'It's such a fine night, it's a pity ter go in already; and he drew her unresisting towards the seat. He put his arm round her waist. 'Un'and me, villin! she said, in apt misquotation of the melodrama, but Jim only laughed, and she made no effort to disengage herself.
Or else he would flash through our conventual darkness a reflex of a brighter world, show us a glimpse of the current literature of the day, read us passages from some enchanting tale, or the last witty feuilleton which had awakened laughter in the saloons of Paris; taking care always to expunge, with the severest hand, whether from tragedy, melodrama, tale, or essay, whatever passage, phrase, or word, could be deemed unsuited to an audience of "jeunes filles."
The whole central and splendid idea of the drama is the fact that Pippa is utterly remote from the grand folk whose lives she troubles and transforms. To make her in the end turn out to be the niece of one of them, is like a whiff from an Adelphi melodrama, an excellent thing in its place, but destructive of the entire conception of Pippa.
Glimmerings from the Eternal visit the obscure study where the soul in travail records patiently the incidents of Time, and elaborates a theory of man's history as if it were framed to end like an Adelphi melodrama or a three-volume novel. But from those very failures, those dissatisfactions, the ideal of the Fourth Age is born, and the law of a greater progress divined.
Mumps seem to sap the constitution of moral force; if she could not see the melodrama, she would weep like a child! It was fine, however.
To come to it from the simplicity and quiet of that noble work is like passing from some exquisite masterpiece of naturalistic acting to the rant and uproar of melodrama; and the Marches stood stunned and bewildered by its wild explosions.
Shipwrecked, remote from human land, environed by dangers known or only conjectured, two solitary beings on a tiny island, thrown haphazard from the depths of the China Sea, this young couple, after passing unscathed through perils unknown even to the writers of melodrama, lifted up their voices in the sheer exuberance of good spirits and abounding vitality.
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