No wonder the Royalty Management, realising how resolutely determined the public was to have nothing to do with anything so witty and workmanlike as _The Foundations_ of Mr. GALSWORTHY, have for their new bill declined upon the pleasantly trivial comedy of errors and tarradiddles, _Billeted_. [Illustration: BILLETING AND COOING. _(The happy ending.)_ _Captain Rymill_ ... MR. DENNIS EADIE. _Betty Taradine_ ... MISS IRIS HOEY.] _Betty Taradine_ is billeting at her pretty manor-house a nice vague Colonel. The Vicar's sister disapproves, because _Betty_ is a grass-widow, and _Penelope_, the all-but-flapper, an insufficient chaperone. She expresses her disapproval with a hardy insolence which must be rare with vicars' sisters in these emancipated times. Naturally when you have a great deal of palaver about _Betty's_ husband having deserted her two years ago after a serious tiff, and no word spoken or written since, you rightly guess that the expected new Adjutant, _Captain Rymill_, will be none other than the missing man. But you probably don't guess that _Betty_, to spoof the Church and keep the _Colonel_, has decided to kill her husband by faked telegram. So you have a distinctly intriguing theme, which Miss TENNYSON JESSE and Captain HARWOOD handle with very considerable adroitness and embroider with many really sparkling and laughter-compelling lines. I should like to ask the pleasant authors some questions. How is it that the infinitely susceptible Colonel who loves _Penelope_, but is so overcome by the pseudo-sorrowing _Betty_ that he is afraid of "saying so much more than he means," and appeals to his invaluable Adjutant for help--how is it he survived a bachelor till fifty? And how did _Betty_, with her abysmal ignorance of pass-book lore, manage to postpone her financial catastrophe for two whole years? And how do they suppose so popular and personable man as _Taradine_ could come back to England under an assumed name without a number of highly inconvenient questions being asked? More seriously, I would ask if they really expect us to believe in the reconciliation on so deep a note of this nice butterfly and this callous husband, who never intended, but for the War, to come back from his big-game shooting, and who took no pains to arrange suitable guidance (there was a lawyer vaguely mentioned but he seems to have been singularly unobtrusive) for the obviously incompetent spouse whom he professes still to love? I am afraid it will not do. The one real point of weakness in the presentation was that Mr. EADIE could not modulate from the key of agreeable flippancy in which the comedy as a whole was set into that of the solemnly sentimental coda. Thus was the artistic unity of a pleasant trifle destroyed.