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CHAPTER XVHI 59 daughter of a country home or the girl who is a slave to a father brutalized by drink, and if the character is well sketched we can take a far more genuine interest in such a character than for the more conventional heroine. The wronged lady appeals to the head. We are sorry for her because she got in trouble. We know that she suffers shame and disgrace, but she brought it on herself. On the other hand the slavey or the country maid suffer through no faults of their own. They are clean and companionable, and we can become more interested in the slavey's lost ten-cent piece than in tlie wronged woman's departed virtue. 12. This is not to be taken as saying that there are not rich dramatic possibilities in the wronged lady. She can be made the central figure in many important plays, but even here the closer we come to heart interest the stronger becomes the appeal. Perhaps the woman is worse than wronged. Perhaps she deliberately sought a life of shame. Perhaps she adopts a waif to satisfy the craving for affection that she may not otherwise gratify. The officers of the law, advised by the neighbors, come and take the child. A story with this base will be far more vital than one in which the woman shoots her traducer or one in which the lady collects compound interest for her own broken heart. These stories may be vivid, perhaps too vivid, but they will not live in memory. You are working for something more than the immediate check, it is to be supposed. If you are, work for heart interest. It is more permanent. Painted ladies and nudity stories move in cycles, for they soon exhaust themselves. Heart interest is in constant demand. 13. Heart interest may also be made to contribute to effect without being the base. It may be action and not plot. There may be little touches in a play that lighten and relieve it. In one of the early Biographs there was a scene where the hero sits at the telephone bidding his family good-bye while a friend in an auto is rushing through the streets to save him from suicide. To prolong the action without making it break through increasing tension a messenger enters the outer office with a telegram. He puts his cigarette down upon the polished surface of a table, goes inside, delivers the telegram and returns to resume his smile and the cigarette. It was a momentary, trivial action, but it put a new touch into the scene and enabled the situation to continue. In another suicide story the man, in writing his farewells, upsets a bottle of ink on the table. In a few minutes he will be where spilled ink does not worry, but habit is strong and he mops up the ink before taking the fatal step. The delay enables a friend to arrive. The following scene is tense, but it gains natural- ness because of the humanizing touch. 14. Heart interest, it then appears, has two purposes. In its best exposition it is a story that appeals to the kindly emotions. In its secondary manifestation it serves to give reality and naturalness to a forced and unconvincing situation. Its essence is genuineness and sincerity, an intense and convincing sincerity like the personality of