that there is as rigid a formula for light comedy. But certainly Mr. DENNY
threw in too many unnecessary mystifications and crude explanations in
proportion to the wit, wisdom and lively incident of his confection. In
particular he was constantly making some of his characters tell the others
what we of the audience either already knew or quite easily guessed. To
exhaust my tedious-homely metaphor, if you put in a double measure of water
the mixture will refuse to rise. And that I imagine is essentially what
happened to _Just Like Judy_.

Irish _Judy_, a charmingly pretty busybody, outwardly just like Miss IRIS
HOEY, comes to _Peter Keppel's_ studio and hears that this casual youth has
got into a deplorable habit of putting off his marriage with her friend
_Milly_. She (_Judy_) will see to that! She assumes the _rôle_ of a
notorious Chelsea model, whom proper _Peter_ has never seen. _Peter_ knocks
his head on the mantelpiece, just where a shrapnel splinter had hit him,
and is persuaded that she, _Judy McCarthy_, affecting to be _Trixie
O'Farrel_, is his wife. It all seems very horrible to him, but, shell-shock
or no shell-shock, he sets to work to paint her portrait in a business-like
way, and at the end of four hours it doesn't seem at all horrible. And by
the time it is explained that it was all a joke (some people do have such a
nice sense of humour) he is all for rushing off to the registry-office,
_Judy_ agreeing.

Not that _Judy_ is a minx. She did her level best to make two people who
obviously didn't love one another fulfil their engagement, instead of, like
a sensible woman, accepting the inevitable, which was, as it happens, so
congenial to her. What puzzled me was _Peter's_ indignation with poor
_Milly_ when he found that she really didn't love him (but, on the
contrary, a bounder called _Crauford_), yet couldn't bear to cause him
unhappiness, and was sacrificing herself for him. As that was his attitude