"A WOMAN'S £12 LOOK."

Otago Witness, Issue 2928, 27 April 1910, Page 79

"A WOMAN'S £l2 LOOK."

MR BARRIE'S NEW PLAY.

Mr J. M. Barrie has produced a very subtle play—a comedy, they call it—in " The £l2 Look," produced at the Duke of York's Theatre. But it is more than a comedy; it is a very searching analysis of the content of married life. What is there in it for the woman of sensibility when she ie married to an advertising gormandiser, whose main text is success as personified in his own expanding limbs? In this case there was nothing, so she left him.

" The play opens," says the Westminster Gazette, "with Mr Harry Sims practising for the ceremony of the knighthood, to be bestowed on the following Thursday, aided by his pretty wife, in full court dress. He is a swelling, strutting, peacocking middle-aged common fellow, bloated with success. A girl has been ordered from a typewriting establishment to write answers to the shower of congratulatory letters received by him. The girl comes, and the little wife begins to dictate to her: 'He is about to be knighted for his services to—er—for his services.' It was an awkward pause. The lady typist took up the running, and anticipated cruelly everything that the wife wanted to say. "Mr Sims enters. Horrors ! He recognises the typist. She is the woman whom he had divorced some years earlier. The prosperous Mr Sims had never succeeded in discovering who was his wife's lover ; he is still consumed with curiosity. They' made a bargain to exchange confidences. Then he pressed her for the name, and she warned him to abstain, but he insisted, and out came the painful truth : there was no lover. She had fled from his house, from his jewels, from his carriages, his rich dinners, because she could "not endure him or them any longer. Results of Typewriting.—

"'I wanted no other man,' she said; ' you sufficed.' Freedom, release from irksome bondage, from the society of him and his friends, was cheap, even at the cost of all material p4v*atages J even of

her good name. He was incredulous at first, and then shrunk. She had meditated flight for a whole year,. but durst not go till she felt sure of being able to earn her own living. It was not till she had made £l2 by working secretly at home with a typewriter, which she hired, that she made the venture. Beware of the £l2 Look.— “ ‘My advice to you husbands,’ she observed, ‘ is to beware of the £l2 look in the eyes of your wife.’ It was not till she had seen the picture of the present Mrs Sims as a bride that the divorcee became venomous, but a comparison of the happy girlish face in the picture and that of the woman whom she had just seen—a creature crushed by life with a toosuccessful husband—roused her to fury. “Fortunately, the wife came in, whereupon Mr Sims turned out, somewhat bruitally, hie former spouse, who kept the secret. The wife uttered a timid remonstrance, and then made the remark that the typist looked very happy when she was at her work. It made Mr Sims very wrath, and when the poor creature asked him timidly how much a typewriter cost the curtain came down upon the man in an attitude of horror. He had seen ‘ the £l2 look ’ in the eyes of the oecond Mrs Sims, of the future Lady Sims.” *