According to the programme what happens is called _The Prodigal Wife_. Her husband is a doctor and she pines for gaiety while he is busy at the hospital. It is her birthday and he has forgotten to bring her her favourite roses, which are in fact offered to her by another gentleman with more leisure and a better memory. Our own grievance against the husband, perhaps capricious, is his appalling straw hat—but then we equally dislike the lovers tail-coat, so matters are even, and the lady’s preference of No. 2 to No. 1 seems merely arbitrary. Anyhow, she goes off with No. 2 in a motor-car, “all out,” leaving the usual explanatory letter behind her, which is thrown on the screen for all of us to gloat over. Here let me say that this profuse exhibition on the screen of all the correspondence in the case, letters, telegrams, copies of verses, last wills and testaments, the whole _dossier_, strikes me as a mistake. It under-values the intelligence of the audience, which is quite capable of guessing what people are likely to write in the given circumstances without being put to the indelicacy of reading it. As it is, you no sooner see some one handling a scrap of paper than you know you are going to have the wretched scrawl thrust under your nose. As if we didn’t know all about these things! As if it wouldn’t be pleasanter to leave the actual text to conjecture! I remember in _Rebellious Susan_ there is a packet of compromising letters shown to interested parties, whose vague comments, “Well, after _that_,” etc., sufficiently enlighten us without anything further. But now, when Lady Macbeth reads her lord’s letter, up it goes on the screen, blots and all. This is an abuse of the film, which finds it easier to exhibit a letter than to explain why it came to be written. As things are, the lady seems to have eloped in a hurry without sufficient grounds. No. 2 presents his roses, and, hey presto! the car is round the corner. No. 1 takes it very nobly, hugs his abandoned babe to his bosom, and pulls long faces (obligingly brought nearer the camera to show the furrows). The mother’s sin shall ever be hidden from the innocent child, and to see the innocent child innocently asking, “Where’s muvver?” and being answered with sad headshakes from the bereaved parent (now bang against the camera) is to bathe in sentimental photography up to the neck.