As soon, therefore, as she is recognized, there is a great pricking-up of ears all over the house. Few are they whose withers are unwrung. Every man among them, primed with his own warfare or that of some defeated chum, settles down to the play, and wives follow suit with a guilty sense that such things are, though "not, thank heaven! under roof of mine."
A sly humor runs through the piece like a warm-colored thread, a humor always faithful to those universal traits that make us kin. It asserts itself robustly from time to time, once, for a notable instance, in the fact that Parbury is moderately well content in his fool's paradise until Gunning appears to beckon him out of it. Heretofore he has accepted his experience like a chronic indigestion or a lameness to which he was born; but now comes another man like unto himself, and welds the data of his martyrdom into a cannonball. This man generalizes, and Parbury at once perceives that husbands are not the victims of special visitation, but of an epidemic. The thing is universal. It can be classified; it can even be attacked. He stands shoulder to shoulder with his suffering brothers, and makes his stroke for liberty.
This is everyday life and the dialogue expresses it; the lines are neither too bright nor good for any drawing-room. Here are no sky-rocketings to make the hearer gasp at the playwright's cleverness, while at the same time they accentuate the difference between his own world and the world as it glitters from the stage. It is the talk to be expected out of the mouths of admirable yet matter-of-fact persons with whom we are quite at home. This is the man you meet at any corner, who is living his life as he conceives it, and is vaguely discomfited when the pattern comes out wrong. He and his fellow puppets are related in the most intimate and delightful way to our own cousins and aunts. It is a group of sharply differentiated types: Parbury, honey-combed with something that passes for amiability; his charming ruler; worldly-wise Gunning, fitted like a glove with amiable cynicisms; the Colonel, clad in rejuvenescence like the spring; and Miss Woodward, an original piquing to the intelligence of any actress ambitious to "create a part."