Punctilious Burglar. "Sorry to disturb you, Guv'nor, but would you mind letting me have the thrippence for your share of the insurance stamp? This is the first job I've had this week."
In an extremely able but peculiarly unpleasant book, The Questing Beast (Secker), I think that Miss Ivy Low makes two serious mistakes. "Tell her," writes the heroine to a friend after the first of two irregular love affairs, "that I thought, 'I am not that kind of girl,' and tell her that there is no 'sort of girl,' and that life is a sea and human beings must catch hold of life-buoys to keep them afloat." To this it may be answered, however, that there is "that kind of girl," and that Rachel Cohen was "that kind of girl," and that it is a kind which deliberately rejects life-buoys when flung out to them. The second mistake, as it seems to me, in a novel which is in many ways a very clever piece of realism, is a strong feminist or, at any rate, anti-masculine bias. Against the cunning dissection of the character of Charles Giddey, a worthless and conceited egotist, I have no complaint to make. It is one of the best things of its kind that I have read for a long time. But it seems unlikely, to say the least, that the heroine, after being deserted by the man she really loves, should, considering her very erotic and unprincipled temperament, find complete happiness in the publication of a successful novel and in devotion to her child. I feel that on a nature like that of Rachel Cohen even Royalties and Press notices would eventually pall. And in pausing I may remark that the beast Glatisant cuts a very episodic and unsatisfactory figure in the Morte D'Arthur. Pursued for a short while by Sir Palamides in his Paynim days, it scarcely comes into the cognisance of King Arthur's Court and the Table Round. And I fancy that the circulating libraries will feel the same about "The Questing Beast."
I do not think that I can recall any novel that makes such insistent demands upon the weather as does Miss Joan Sutherland's Cophetua's Son (Mills and Boon). The sun, the rain, the wind, the snow—these are from the first page to the last at their intensest, wildest, brightest, most furious, and as I closed the book and looked out upon a day of monotonous drizzle I thanked Heaven for the English climate. But I imagine that Miss Sutherland was aware that nothing but the most vigorous of climatic conditions would afford a true background for her hero's tempestuous soul. Lucien de Guise was unfortunate enough to be the son of a flower-girl, and I had no idea, until Miss Sutherland made it plain to me, how terrible his friends and the members of the smartest of London's clubs—"Will's, a place of great historic interest and brilliant reputation, developing gradually into one of the most exclusive clubs in London, and very strictly limited in numbers"—held so ignominious an origin. There is a scene in Will's where Colonel Maclean, "a handsome man and a famous soldier," expels M. de Guise "with a perceptible degree of asperity" in his voice—a scene that does the greatest credit to Miss Sutherland's imagination. Indeed, I am afraid that Miss Sutherland's ambition to write a really dramatic story has driven her into incredibilities of atmosphere, of incident, and of character. M. de Guise, with his flashing, gleaming eyes, his love of liqueurs, his passion for smashing the most priceless of Nankin vases whenever he sees them, is, surveyed under these grey English skies, an unreal figure, and his world, I am afraid, too brightly coloured to be convincing.
"Ruler wanted for Ireland (N.S.); good wages, permanency to competent, reliable man.—Full particulars to Box 167, Daily News, Manchester."—Daily News.
Don't reply to it, Mr. Redmond. It is not in your line. It is a printer's advertisement, merely.