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Oh, if you would only go away, go away and leave us alone—mother here with that son of hers—I with that Child—that Boy there always alone—and then I alone, alone in those shadows!

The Step-Daughter makes this exclamation toward the end of Act III in her vision of the author. In her memory, the author sits at his writing table as the Characters haunt him from the shadows, hovering in the twilight between life and unreality. The Step-Daughter especially appears to him in all her seductive charm, attempting to lure him to grant her life. She appears consumed with her own image lost. Thus she progressively casts the Characters from the author's side, making a sudden movement "as if in the vision she has of herself illuminating those shadows she wanted to seize hold of herself." In entering the reality of the stage, the Step-Daughter would become self-identical and certainly dispense with the alienating figure of the actress. The Step- Daughter's narcissism appears explicitly in the act previous. There she furiously insists on the primacy of her part. As the Manager complains, the Step-Daughter would break the "neat little framework" of an organized cast, a cast with its primary and secondary figures that stays closely within the limits of the actable.

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