Unattractive as Sophia Ree was in many ways, I frankly admit that she was a lady of mettle. A stockbroker's typist, with a fortune of £2,000 and a salary of a few shillings a week, she no sooner obtained inside information about the floating of The South Seas Coastal Rubber Development Company than she decided to apply for 2000 shares. They were allotted to her, and in consequence she became a most important person. In fact, she had only to say "Gugenheim" to her employers and she had them at her feet. Why this was so you must discover for yourselves; all that I, who am no expert in financial matters, can tell you is that somehow her 2000 shares seem to have given her a position of enormous power in the company, and that the Gugenheim man wanted to buy her out. Her sister Judith kept bees and was an extremely good woman. I never got really to understand her; and her wonderful power of seeing into the future, which does not often go with apiculture, left me unimpressed. The trouble with this book of Mr. E. R. Punshon's is that the parts of it do not seem to fit into a symmetrical whole, but, at any rate, a study of The Crowning Glory (Hodder and Stoughton) has greatly improved my knowledge of the behaviour of bears and bulls and bees.
GOLF AND THE DRAMA.
Act III.—The final putt on the last green which is to decide the fate of the house of Devereux.