Popsy, Lady Ramsgate, is even more furious about it than his parents. "Ramsgate and Elizabeth have behaved like fools," she said to me yesterday; "they don't know their world in the least, though they've lived in it nearly half a century. What if the minx wasn't particularly young and pretty. A chauffeuse is a novelty, and when you've said that you've said everything."
Your Blanche is enormously busy just now editing a book that's going to be the sensation of the Spring crop of volumes. You're aware, of course, m'amie, that if a book's even to be looked at now it must be either Somebody's Memories of Everybody Else or Somebody's Experiences in an Enemy Country. Well, and so Stella Clackmannan and I, in the hostel we run for poor dears who've lost their situations abroad and have no friends to go to on coming back here, found among our guests a bright little Cockney who's been what she calls an up-and-down girl in the Royal Palace at Bashbang, the capital of Rowdydaria. My dearest, the things that girl has climbed over and crawled under, and the weather she's come through, in escaping from the Rowdydarians and getting back here! And the things she's seen and heard in the Palace! It will throw a flood of light on all sorts of things, and will certainly make our F.O. sit up.
With the help of a clever photographer and some imagination we've reconstructed the up-and-down girl's adventures quite nicely. There are photos of the King of Rowdydaria as head of his own army; in his uniform as Colonel of the Hun Räuberundmörder Regiment; and in the Arab burnous in which he is to lead an attack on Egypt. There's a photo of the up-and-down girl sweeping a passage and listening through a key-hole to a wonderful conversation between the King of R. and an Emperor who'd come to see him (luckily it was in English and she remembers every word): "You've got to say you did it." "But I haven't got any navy—I couldn't have done it." "I'll give you the submarine that did it—or lend it to you. There! now it's yours—for a time. You don't depend on the Neutralians for any supplies. So you can afford to tell them you did it—and be quick about it." "But you can't expect even the Neutralians to swallow that!" "Why, you fool, they'd swallow anything! That's the meaning of their phrase 'rubber-neck.'" There's a photo of the Queen of Rowdydaria coming up at this point, snatching the broom away, and beating the up-and-down girl with it, and calling her "Spying English Pig." Altogether, my dear, it's positively enthralling! Order your copy early, for people will be slaying each other for this book. Astounding Disclosures of an Up-and-down Girl in the Royal Palace at Bashbang will certainly quite quite eclipse those two other sensations, What a Buttons Overheard in the Imperial Pickelhaube Schloss and Amazing Revelations of a Tweeny in the Perhapsburg Hof.
Ever thine,
Blanche.
How to put People at their Ease.
"The officer in command, Lieut. Berg, was exceedingly pleasant, and did all in his power to put the passengers at their ease and make them feel comfortable.... He had a large bomb placed in the engine-room, and another on the bridge, which could be exploded easily by electricity."—Daily News.
"AMERICA'S LAST WORD FOR
THE HUN.
SIXTEEN PAGES TO-DAY."Daily Mirror Poster.
These American last words!