The Misleading Lady

Examiner of Plays' Summary:

A bustling and rather cleverly constructed American play. There are a multitude of characters and incidents, but the story can be can be told briefly in its essentials. In a country house on the Upper Hudson. Helen, a beautiful girl, wagers that she will make Jack Craigen propose to her by a certain time: if she does she is to have the part of "The Siren" in an imaginary play of Barrie's given her by her manager, also there. It comes off. Jack takes it well. But at the end of the first act as he is leaving and they are alone, after some plain speech to her about women and their weapon of sex, he suddenly smothers her in his big coat and carries her off in his car. In the second act they arrive at a solitary shanty in the Andriondacks. He bullies her and mocks her - but there is no suggestion of any evil intention. Then, when the man she is engaged to, Tracey, is heard approaching to kill Jack, she confesses that she loves him. After this, however, she stuns him with the telephone receiver and goes off. In the third act he comes to, Tracey arrives, there is the usual revolver hands-up business in which Jack scores, and ultimately Helen returns to say she had only gone to try to get a doctor and loves Jack and not Tracey, who had falsely pretended to Jack she was already married to him. The plot is complicated by the antics of an escaped lunatic who thinks himself Napoleon, which are not offensive, however; by some foolish undergraduates and so forth. Jack's speech is fairly frank but never to the point of the inadmissible. I have marked a passage in act 1, p 38 which may be thought in bad taste, but I do not think should be cut. G. S. Street.