"Sheila."

Mark Holdsworth, a bachelor of middle age, is bored with commercial success and seeks a diversion. He would like to have a son. And his attractive typist, Sheila, strikes his fancy as a suitable medium. On her side the girl (obviously recognisable by her innocence as a pre-war flapper) is sick of drudgery, longs very simply for the joys of life, as she imagines them, meaning freedom and pretty dresses and money to spend and piles of invitation cards, and so forth. His proposal of marriage, practically the first word he has ever said to her outside their business relations, seems to her too good to be true. There is no question of a grand passion, not even a question of every-day romance. It is just a fair exchange, though she is too young to appreciate the man's motives and is content with the pride of being his choice and the prospects of the wonderful life that opens before her.

Three months later (they are married and in their different ways have grown to care for one another) we find her discontented. Her social blunders and the attitude of his people have set her on edge, and we are further to understand that she is not very responsive to the strength of his feelings for her. A bad shock comes when she hears, through a jealous woman-friend of his bachelor days, that he has married her for the sake of a son. This poisons for her the memory of their first union and she refuses to be his wife again.

An old obligation, entered into before his marriage, compels him to go abroad on business where she cannot accompany him. He does not know that she is to have a child, and in his absence she keeps the knowledge from him. Her boy is born and dies. The news, reaching Holdsworth through a brother, brings him home, and husband and wife are reconciled. Such is the plot, told crudely enough.

Now, if Miss Sowerby meant deliberately to create a woman who does not really know what she wants—a creature of moods without assignable motives—then I am not ashamed of failing to understand her Sheila, since her Sheila did not understand herself. But if she is designed to illustrate the eternal feminine (always supposing that there is such a thing) then I protest that her chief claim to be representative of her sex is her unreasonableness. Of course I should never pretend to say of a woman in drama or fiction that she has not been drawn true to nature. To know one man is, in most essentials, to know all men; to know fifty women (though this may be a liberal education) does not advance you very far in knowledge of a sex that has never been standardized.

When we first meet Sheila her idea of happiness is to spend an evening (innocent of escort) at the picture-palace; take this from her and her heart threatens to break. Three short months and she has developed to the point of breaking off relations with a husband who has given her all the picture-palaces she wanted, but has also committed the unpardonable indecency of marrying her with the object of getting a son!

Sheila. "Before you married me you weren't nearly so nice to me. It's horrid of you to change."

Mark Holdsworth . . MR. C. AUBREY SMITH.
Sheila . . . . . . . . .MISS FAY COMPTON.

Here, if she approves the attitude of her heroine, I am tempted to argue, in my dull way, with the charming author of Sheila. You must always remember that there was no love—not even courtship—before this betrothal. The girl was swept off her feet by the honour done to her and by the chance of seeing "life" as she had never hoped to see it. The man, on his side, wanted a son. Was his object so very contemptible in comparison with hers? Women marry by the myriad for the mere sake of having children, and nobody blames them. Indeed, we call it, very reverentially, the maternal instinct. Well, what is the matter with the paternal instinct?

However, I am not going to set my opinion up against Miss Sowerby's. Where I can follow her I find so much clear insight and observation that I must needs have faith in her good judgment where I cannot understand. This arrangement still leaves me free to prefer her in her less serious moments. Here she is irresistible with that delicate humour of hers that is always in the picture and never has to resort to the device of manufactured epigram. There is true artistry in her lightest touch. Her people are not galvanised puppets; they simply draw their breath and there they are. And she has the particular quality of charm that makes you yield your heart to her, even when your head remains your own.

How much she owes to Miss Fay Compton's interpretation of Sheila she would be the first to make generous acknowledgment. It was an astonishingly sensitive performance. Miss Compton can be eloquent with a single word or none at all. By a turn of her eyes or lips she can make you free of her inarticulate thoughts. I must go again just to hear her say "Yes," and give that sigh of content at the end of the First Act.

Mr. Aubrey Smith as Mark Holdsworth had a much easier task, and did it with his habitual ease. Mr. William Farren—a very welcome return—was perfect as ever in a good grumpy part. It was strange to see the gentle Miss Stella Campbell playing the unsympathetic character of a jealous and rather cruel woman; but she took to it quite kindly. Mr. Lance Lister, as the boy Geoffrey, who kept intervening in the most sportsmanlike way on the weaker side and adjusting some very awkward complications with the gayest and most resolute tact, was extraordinarily good. Admirable, too, were Miss Joyce Carey as a shop-girl friend of Sheila's boarding-house period, and Mr. Henry Oscar as her "fate," whose line was shirts. The scene in which these two encounter the superior relatives of Sheila's husband abounded in good fun, kept well within the limits of comedy. It was a pure joy to hear Miss Hooker's garrulous efforts to carry off the situation with aggressive gentility; but even more fascinating was the abashed silence of her young man, broken only when he blurted out the word "shirts," and gave the show away.

The whole cast was excellent, and Sir George Alexander must be felicitated on a very clever production. But it is to author and heroine that I beg to offer the best of my gratitude for a most refreshing evening.

O.S.

"You will find that the men most likely to get off the note are those who never really got on to it."—Musical Times.

The real question is how those who never got on to the note contrive to get off it.

Mother (reading paper). "I see a baker's been fined ten pounds for selling bread less than twelve hours old."

Alan (who now goes to school by train—joining in). "Oh, think! and he might have pulled the cord and stopped the train twice for that!"