The play analyses and satirises the status of marriage in Shaw's day, with a particular focus on the necessity of liberalising divorce laws.

Cecil and Edith leave together and return married - though the ceremony involved the Beadle giving away the bride.

They have arranged with an insurance company a deal that will free Cecil of responsibility for any future debt incurred by his wife.

In return Cecil has provided a document declaring that if he commits a crime while insane, his wife may divorce him.

Hotchkiss, who, it turns out was being pursued by Leo rather against his own wishes, falls in love with the siren-like Mrs George Collins.

In a future society, he argued, there could be no practicable replacement for marriage, neither individually negotiated deals or unconstrained "free love".

[4] Homer E. Woodbridge says, "It has only small bits of action, and these are divided among three groups of people who are very loosely related.

But the subtitle and the comment call attention to the two distinctive peculiarities in the form of the play: it is primarily a discussion, and it consists of only one interminable scene.