THE BREAKING POINT. Mary Roberts Rinehart

Elizabeth, of her sweetness and sanity. He remembered her at the theater the evening before, lost in its fictitious emotions, its counterfeit drama. He had felt moved to comfort her, when he found her on the verge of tears.

      “Just remember, they're only acting,” he had said.

      “Yes. But life does do things like that to people.”

      “Not often. The theater deals in the dramatic exceptions to life. You and I, plain bread and butter people, come to see these things because we get a sort of vicarious thrill out of them.”

      “Doesn't anything ever happen to the plain bread and butter people?”

      “A little jam, sometimes. Or perhaps they drop it, butter side down, on the carpet.”

      “But that is tragedy, isn't it?”

      He had had to acknowledge that it might be. But he had been quite emphatic over the fact that most people didn't drop it.

      After a long time he slept in his chair. The spring wind came in through the opened window, and fluttered the leaves of the old prayer-book on the stand.