For _Jack Stacey_, who opened the Prologue in Loolong with head in hands and moaned invocations of the Deity (a version doubtless of the well-known gambit, "'Hell!' said the Duchess"), had his little daughter kidnapped at birth or thereabouts (by _Wang Fu_, as it happened), and never saw her again till, after eighteen years of opium-doping--between the Prologue and the First Act--he called upon the same _Wang Fu_ (just before dinner) with a peremptory message from a very bad and powerful mandarin that if little Miss _Che Fu_ were not packed off to China by eleven that same evening the Elder Brethren would be one short by midnight. _Che Fu_, I ought to say, passed as _Wang's_ daughter, but was so English, you know, to look at that nobody could really believe it. Of course _Jack_ didn't recognise her as his own daughter, but equally of course we did, and knew that she would be rescued by her impetuous boy-lover and restored to her real father; but not before great business with opium pipes, pivoting statues of goddesses, inoperative revolvers, gongs, strangulations (with gurgles), detectives, rows of Chinese servants each more rascally (and less Chinese, if possible) than the last, and over all the polished villainy of the inscrutable _Wang Fu Chang_. Mr. JEFFREY'S technique was quite adequate for this ingenuous kind of thing. He achieved what I take to be the supreme compliment of noisy hushings sibilated from the pit and gallery when the later curtains rose. Perhaps action halted a little to allow of rather too much display of pidgin-English and (I suppose) authentic elementary Chinese and comic reliefs which filled the spaces between the salient episodes of the slender and naive plot. I couldn't help wondering how _Jack Stacey_, whom we left at 10.45 in a horrible stupor, shut away in a gilded alcove of _Wang Fu's_ opium den, could appear at 11.30 at _Lady Handley's_ in immaculate evening dress and with entirely unruffled hair, having in the meantime cut down and restored to consciousness two tortured Chinese and heard the true story of his daughter's adventures. This seems to be overdoing the unities. And I wondered whether the puzzled look on young _Handley's_ face was due to this same wonder or to the reflection that if he had shed one undesirable father-in-law he had let himself in for another. For, needless to say, they had all met in the famous opium scene when _Stacey_ was naturally not at his best.