Rachel Crothers' new comedy, "When Ladies Meet," is clever, sophisticated, and light, but not convincing. It continues, however, to be one of the season's attractions at the Royale, and many have lavish praise for the play, the vast, and the delightful helter-skelter performance of Spring Byington.

John Golden has gathered an extremely capable cast for such a frothy vehicle. Frieda Inescort has a more serious part than in "Springtime for Henry." As Mary Howard, an author, she has the unpleasant task to ask her publisher's wife to surrender the husband because she is really in love with him, and he believes himself to be in the same condition. One feels it would be much easier to doff the chain of virtue which Miss Inescort wears so self-consciously and skip off with the publisher, instead of being so deadly moody and moral about it all. Serious women are apt to be irritating anyway. Secretly one admires people who are so fearlessly frank, but when one sees them in action, they look silly.

Miss Crothers has tried so many combinations of the misunderstood wife, the neglected and frigid husband, and the frustrated spinster that she does not get very much intensity into scenes that should be dramatically poignant. Although it is not the fashion to be aroused or wistful, surely the scene where Caine Woodruff, the publisher's wife finds out that she is in the same room with the woman who has enticed her husband, and the parting scenes are too artificially cool.

In the book that Mary Howard is in the process of finishing, the wife understands the plea of the other woman in love with her husband and blandly surrenders him, but when the ladies really meet under unusual circumstances in the country Claire Woodruff (Selena Royale) is very unsympathetic, and even the husband (Herbert Rawlinson) when confronted by both wife and mistress, male like chooses his wife, thereby being deserted by both. This is what Miss Crothers attempts to draw through three acts.

The comic lines are relieving, and Spring Byington, the casual widow at whose country home the meeting takes place, is the grace note in a play where everyone else has something on his of her mind. But even with the uniformly excellent acting. "When Ladies Meet" by little more than good entertainment.