JUSTIFICATION.
Wife. "Two bottles of ginger-beer, dear?""
He. "Why, yes. Have you forgotten that this is the anniversary of our wedding-day?"
OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
It is pleasant to find that even in these days the revival of interest in volumes of short stories still continues. But of course the stories must have a certain quality. I am glad to think that Traveller's Samples (Mills and Boon) will help forward the movement. Mrs. Henry Dudeney has a quite excellent touch for this sort of thing; her tales are both atmospheric and, for their length, astonishingly full of character. Also she has an engaging habit of avoiding the expected. Take one of the best in this present book, called "John," for instance. It is the slightest possible thing, just a picture of a schoolboy's hopeless love for a shallow cruel-brained girl eight years older than himself, who is in process of getting engaged to an eligible bachelor. But every figure in the little group lives. And the second part, which tells the return of the boy-lover twelve years later, shows you what I mean about Mrs. Dudeney's refreshing originality. I doubt if there are many writers who would have finished off the story in her very satisfactory way. There is one quality characteristic of most of the tales—a feeling for middle-age in men and women; many of them seem to be variations upon the same theme of a love that comes by waiting. Mrs. Dudeney can handle this situation with unfailing charm. Her confessed comedies are by far the weakest things in the book; there is one of them indeed that seemed to me amazingly pointless. But with this exception I can commend her volume whole-heartedly, and only hope that the author will continue to send out goods of such excellent workmanship, "as per" (whatever that means) these attractive samples.
Those who search for minor compensations have affected to find one in the idea that the actual happening of the World War has removed from us the old fictional scares, novels of German super-spies, and unsuspecting islanders taken unprepared. But to think this is to reckon without the ingenuity of such writers as Mr. Ridgwell Cullum. He, for example, has but to postulate that worst nightmare of all, an inconclusive peace, and we are back in the former terrors, blacker than ever. Suppose the Polish inventor of German undersea craft to have been so stricken with remorse at the frightful results thereof that he determines to hand all his secrets to the English Government, in the person of a young gentleman who combines the positions of Cabinet Minister, son and heir to a great shipbuilder, and hero of the story; suppose, moreover, that the said inventor was blessed with an only daughter, of radiant beauty and the rather conspicuous name of Vita Vladimir; suppose the inevitable romance, a secret submarine expedition to the island where Germany is maturing her felonious little plans, the destruction of the latest frightfulness, retaliation by Prussian myrmidons, abductions, murders, and I don't know what besides—and you will have some faint idea of the tumultuous episodes of The Men Who Wrought (Chapman and Hall). To say that the story moves is vastly to understate its headlong rapidity of action. And, while I hardly fancy that the characters themselves will carry overwhelming conviction, there remains, in the theory of the submersible liner and application to political facts, enough genuine wisdom to lift the tale out of the company of six-shilling shockers. To this extent at least The Men Who Wrought combines instruction with entertainment.