Mrs. Dowey (actually a virgin spinster), felt herself out of it because she had no son at the Front to talk about.  I gathered that it was not so much a case of unsatisfied yearning for motherhood, as that she wanted to hold her own with the other charwomen who were represented in the trenches.  So she assumed the relationship of an anonymous marraine towards a certain unknown namesake in the Black Watch, and made boastful pretence of having received letters from her son.

Suddenly she is confronted with this Private Dowey, home on leave—­a lonely soldier with no family ties.  The joy that she had taken in her imagined sense of proprietorship is dashed by fear of exposure and of possible resentment on his part.  At first he treats her intrusion almost brutally, but is soon mollified by the offer of food and other hospitality; and by the time his leave is up he has developed an almost filial regard for her.  Their parting is as the parting of a tender-hearted mother and a rather unemotional son.  The pathos of this scene, though designed and interpreted with a very sensitive restraint, was comparatively obvious—­a commonplace, indeed, of these heart-rending days.  There was a far more subtle and original note of pathos in the contrast between the brusque humour of the man’s casual acceptance of the situation and the timorous, adoring, dog-like devotion of the woman.  Here tears and laughter were never far apart.

I could wish that the impression left by this picture had not been a little spoiled by the final scene, in which she lingers lovingly over the medals and uniform of the dead soldier.  No good purpose, dramatic or other, was served by this gratuitous appendage to a finished work of art.

Miss JEAN CADELL was simply wonderful; and Mr. MULCASTER, as Private Dowey, typically Scottish in his cautious reservations, was admirable.  Mr. EDGAR WOOD played capably as one of our many eligible but non-combatant clergymen; and the chorus of aggressively humorous charwomen, though perhaps they had rather too much to say, said it very well.

[Illustration:  “SEVEN WOMEN” AND ONE SAILOR.

Leonora ...  Miss IRENE VANBRUGH.

Captain Rattray, R.N ...  MR. GORDON ASH.]

Sir JAMES BARRIE’S other one-Act play, Seven Women (all rolled into one), suffered, as might be expected, from compression. Leonora had to be a clinging motherly creature, a desperate flirt, a gifted humourist, a woman without humour, a murderess (out of an old play by the same author), and two other types which escape me.  In the course of about a quarter of an hour she had to give a succinct precis of the different moods which her versatile personality might in actual life conceivably have assumed if she had had a month to do it in.  Miss IRENE VANBRUGH, with her swift humour and her skill as a quick-change artist, naturally revelled in this tour de force, and, thanks to her, the author came very near to being justified of his caprice.