Continuing denial of the facts of Teddy's and Ruth's marriage and children may serve critics as a means of expressing their own rejection of what occurs in the play. Knowing Ruth as she slowly reveals herself, it is easier, and likely more comforting, to dismiss the proposition that she had ever been a housewife, much less the mother of three children born during a six year span whom she appears to have no intention of ever seeing again. The notion of a mother willingly, indeed facilely, abandoning her husband, and, especially, her children, to become a prostitute, must have been, especially at that time, almost unprecedented in "respectable" drama and literature and on the "legitimate" stage up to that time.