“You’re sure this is Wiltshire bacon?”
“Er—I wouldn’t like to guarantee it, Madam—not absolutely.”
“Where do you get it from, then?”
“Well, it comes from America, Madam.”
OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch’s Staff of Learned Clerks.)
Probably one of your first, and abiding, impressions of The Third Window (Secker) will be that of almost extreme modernity. Certainly Anne Douglas Sedgwick (Mrs. Basil de Selincourt) has produced a story that, both in its protagonists—a young war-widow and a maimed ex-officer—and in its theme—spirit-communication and survival of personality—is very much of the moment. It is a short book, not two hundred pages all told, and with only three characters. You observe that I have given you no particulars as to the third, though (or because) she is of the first importance to the development. To say more of this would be to ruin all, since suspense is essential to its proper savouring; though I may indicate that it turns upon the question whether the dead husband is still so far present as to forbid the union of his widow and his friend. The thing is exceedingly well done, despite a suggestion now and again that the situation is becoming something too fine-drawn; I found myself also in violent disagreement with the ending, though for what reasons I must deny myself the pleasure of explaining. Perhaps the cleverest feature of an unusual tale is the idea of Wyndwards, the modern “artistic” house that is its setting—a house rather over deliberate and self-conscious in its simplicity and beauty, lacking soul, but swept and garnished for the reception of the seven devils of bogiedom. The atmosphere of this is both new and conveyed with a very subtle skill.