Title and form: A three-act drawing-room comedy in prose, set in present‑day Mayfair, that examines marriage, fidelity, and social manners through farce and domestic satire.

Dramatis personae and setting: Principal characters are Penelope O’Farrell (young wife), Dr. Richard “Dickie” O’Farrell (her husband, a fashionable physician), Professor and Mrs. Golightly (Penelope’s parents), Davenport Barlow (self‑important bachelor uncle), Mr. Beadsworth (family solicitor), Mrs. Fergusson (the flirtatious “other woman”), Peyton (the maid) and several minor comic figures. The action unfolds in three interiors of the O’Farrell household: a drawing‑room, Dickie’s consulting‑room, and Penelope’s boudoir.

Structural summary — Act I: The play opens with a comic sequence of telegrams and misunderstandings. Penelope has summoned relatives with deliberately puzzling messages to provoke their passions and secure a dramatic audience. Misread wires produce a gathering of caricatured family friends. Penelope then reveals she intends to divorce Dickie for an alleged affair with Ada Fergusson; the family reacts in predictable social ways. Professor Golightly uses a running mathematical metaphor—“two and two” repeatedly—to advance a pragmatic, almost amoral theory of human relationships: that love must be managed, rationed and sometimes strategically withheld. The act ends with Penelope’s admission that she engineered the summons and with her declaration of despair.

Act II: The scene shifts to Dickie’s consulting‑room, alternating professional banter and domestic tension. Dickie’s routine practice provides comic interludes (an eccentric patient, a persistent “doctor’s widow”), while household anxieties intensify: Penelope covertly observes Dickie’s movements; bills and purchases provide tangible evidence of jealousy and compensation. Mrs. Fergusson appears; a fabricated patient, “Mrs. Mack,” functions as Dickie’s alibi and economy of deception. Money, appearance and social reputation are repeatedly foregrounded. With Golightly’s counsel ringing in her ears, Penelope chooses strategic reticence: rather than confront, she will “give him his head” to let the affair collapse. Through a comedic telephone ruse Dickie is persuaded to cancel the planned Paris trip with Ada.

Act III: In Penelope’s boudoir the strategy comes to fruition. Penelope reveals she has known all along and has manipulated appearances: she stages sympathy, theatrical breakdowns, and social legerdemain to unmask and neutralize Ada’s claim. Golightly’s aphorisms are applied as tactics for long‑term marital maintenance. After a sequence of confessions, failed intrigues and reconciliations, the play concludes on a conciliatory note—husband and wife renew mutual pledges, with an ironic awareness that love requires management rather than simple passion.

Themes and devices: The play is a comedy of manners that satirizes bourgeois anxieties about class, money, and respectability. Recurrent motifs—telegrams, receipts, imagined patients, and the “two‑and‑two” arithmetic—structure its formal wit. The tone alternates light irony with pointed moral observation: fidelity is less an absolute than a negotiated social practice, preserved by tact, occasional performance and reciprocal self‑control. The construction favors rapid dialogue, situational reversals and the theatrical economy of misunderstanding, yielding both humour and a pragmatic reflection on married life.