Various

“ I have too much faith in the good sense of my fellow-countrywomen to believe that they would cart a horrible thing like a cheap attaché-case about simply in order to convey a sandwich or a powder-puff from one end of London to the other. ”

“ I seized a palm, followed it up, and found that it belonged to a pinched sour-looking female. Her character was stamped on her face as well as on her hand. If, however, I had said to her, "Yours is a flaccid repressed disposition you have a lack of imagination and a total absence of humour; your life is too narrow and self-centred to be of the least interest to anyone," she might not have liked it. You see, with even a slight knowledge of palmistry you soon find out when reading hands that it's no use telling people the truth. ”

“ The Bill gave her dualism "with a shadowy background of remote and potential unity." The vaunted Council was "a fleshless and bloodless skeleton." He remarked upon "the sombre acquiescence of the Ulstermen," and wondered why they had accepted the Bill at all. "Because we don't trust you," came the swift reply from Sir Edward Carson.
Mr. Asquith's own remedy for Irish unrest was to take the Act of 1914 and transform it into something like Dominion Home Rule. Any county—Ulster or Sinn Fein—that voted against coming under the Dublin Parliament should be left under the present administration. ”

“ I would remind him, or rather perhaps the more ingenuous of his readers, that there have been later contributions to the theory and practice of new-world building than Mr. Bellamy's Looking Backward.
The Great Desire (Hodder and Stoughton) is a novel full of shrewd philosophy and excellent talk. Mr. Alexander Black sets out to prove nothing, to justify no political or social attitude, but just to draw his fellow-Americans as he sees them going about their war-time business, the "great desire" being simply the thing that is uppermost in the mind of each one. ”

“ Between him, the romancer of the light heart and the free fancy, and his brother, the millionaire tradesman of the tough hide, there was the clash of temperaments but never the clash of intellects. ("Nobody with a sense of humour," says Uncle Ned, "ever made a million pounds.") That the man with the iron will should be beaten at the last with his own weapons, and brought to see the lifelong error of his ways by a violent philippic that must have surprised the speaker hardly less than his audience, was the most incredible thing in the play. ”

“ To those, if any, who contend that the Government should be left to carry out its own propaganda for the League of Nations the obvious answer is that it is necessary for this work to be done by an independent body which can bring public pressure to bear upon the Government of the day and urge such amendments in the machinery and constitution of the League as time and experience may show to be desirable. ”

“ Personally, as a private secretary, I find it very difficult, though I do my best. As a private secretary I labour in a rich house in the notoriously idle neighbourhood of South Kensington, where nobody would believe that anybody laboured, much less perspired over it. So when I pass, on the way to my rich house, a builder's labourer or a milkman or a dustman, I have to exhibit as clearly as I can all the signs of a harsh employment and industrial fatigue. ”

“ It will be a terrible thing if everyone is going to carry the tools of his trade about with him to show that he has a trade; the barrister his briefs, the doctor his stethoscope or his shiny black bag; the butcher his chopper; the dentist—but no, we cannot have that. There must be other ways. We might wear badges, as we did in the War, only they would be office badges and trade badges, instead of regimental badges or discharged badges. ”

“ For that nothing is more essential than a strong and enduring League of Nations. The Covenant of Paris is a good foundation, well and truly laid. But it is and can be no more than a foundation. The nature and strength of the structure to be built upon it must depend on the earnestness and sincerity of popular support. ”

“ One never feels that latent antagonism which readers, even though they may agree with him, unconsciously experience towards an author who seems to be arguing a point. Mr. Black gives the extreme views of the blatant patriot, and of the anarchist and socialist who cannot see the distinction between arguing against war on paper and arguing against this War on the street corner. He makes us realise the people who think only how to make the War an adjunct of themselves and those who desire only to make themselves a useful adjunct of the War. ”

“ When a man produces his first play or novel or book of poems I write him an admiring letter. You can't lay it on too thick. Ask him some question on a topic that interests him. It always draws. They are unused to praise and you catch them before the public has spoilt them. I card-index all the replies I get. Of course nine out of ten of the people turn out of no account, but some are sure to come off. You just throw out the failures and put the successes in your collection."
At this point I heard our Archdeacon afar off. Our Archdeacon booms—not like trade, but like the bittern. ”

“ The very lowest a man with an attaché-case could be was a First-Class Civil Servant; and one was justified in imagining confidential papers inside, or, at any rate, home-work of the first importance. But nowadays there are too many of them for that. The attaché-case has been degraded; it is [pg 252] universal. This might be because there is practically no male person alive just now who has not been an adjutant at one time or another, and pinched at least one attaché-case from the orderly-room. But most of the cases in the Tube are carried by females, so that theory is no good. ”

“ Nothing in the previous two days' debate—not even Mr. Bonar Law's ruthless analysis of the Paisley policy for Ireland—gripped the audience so intensely as Sir Edward Carson's explanation of the Ulster attitude. He declared that the Union had not failed in Ulster, and would not have failed anywhere if British politicians could have refrained from bidding for Irish votes. There was no alternative to it but complete separation, and that was what Home Rule would lead to. Ulster did not want the Bill, and would not vote for it ”

“ I am one of those men who do not mind going about with a comparatively naked bottle. I carry it simply because it is the tool of my trade, and because, if you don't carry a tool of some kind on the Underground, at any moment you may be taken for an idle rich, if not actually a parasite, who never sweated in his life. ”

“ Sweating is the great criterion of usefulness to-day. If you cannot show that you have sweated in the past, you must at least show that you are sweating now, or have every intention of sweating in a moment or two. ”

“ I was rather surprised to know that, for one thing, some knowledge of Spiritualism is necessary to enable one to be a popular entertainer nowadays. It has never struck me before that spiritualists were such a genial class, full of bonhomie and great joy ”

“ B., after an interview with the whisky bottle, forgets her part and, lapsing into the mere widow of the undertaker, gives it to the intriguing Lady Tonbridge in the neck with a wealth of imagery, a command of slightly slurred invective and a range of facial expression beyond adequate description, she is perhaps less attractive in the capacity of mother-by-marriage than ever, even if the interlude prove the goodness of her heart. But it is just at that moment that the young person is recognised by her maid. ”

“ Asquith's advice and pass the Bill, even though it should have the paradoxical result, for the moment, of leaving Nationalist Ireland under British administration while providing Unionist Ulster with a Home Rule Parliament for which it has never asked.
I suppose Mr. Devlin is not like the Sinn Feiners, who, according to "T. P.," are so contemptuous of the Bill that they have never read a line of it. Parts of his speech, and particularly his peroration, seemed far more suitable to a Coercion Bill than to a measure which is designed, however imperfectly, to grant Home Rule to Ireland. ”

“ She freely accepts the absurdities which her bizarre outline demands, but doesn't shirk the pains to make her situations possible within the pleasantly impossible frame. What is all-important is that she does shake the house with genuinely explosive humour. ”

“ If it were only for his complete fearlessness in following well-worn convention and his apparent reliance on his readers' ignorance or want of memory, Mr. J. Murray Gibbon's Drums Afar (Lane) would be rather a remarkable book in these psycho-analytical days. His hero actually has the audacity to have blue eyes and fair hair, to start his career in the House, and to end it, so far as the novel is concerned, lying wounded in a hospital, where his fiancée, a famous singer, happened to be a nurse in the same ward. Nor does the young man disdain the threadbare conversational cliché. ”

“ Then they parted, and the other woman came in at the gate and up the drive.
"My dear Elfrida," said a well-known voice, "what have you been up to? You seem to have thoroughly upset that nice woman who was with the Copplestones so long. She told me you were a very strange lady; in fact she thought you must be suffering from a nervous breakdown."
I leaned for support against the door-post, feeling a little faint.
"Brenda? You?" I gasped. "I thought——"
"Such a splendid maid she is," Brenda went on. "You'll never find her equal if you try for ten years." ”

“ Mere man may not understand the enormity of this offence; but every woman knows there is no crime more heinous, more despicable, more unforgivable. She might find it in her heart to condone larceny, think lightly of arson, or even excuse murder ”

“ It is now thought probable that a local miner may have dropped his week's wages whilst entering his car and that his secretary has not yet called his attention to the deficit.
"The way some newsboys dodge in and out of the moving traffic is most dangerous and a serious accident is sure to result before very long," complains a writer in an evening paper. For ourselves we cannot but admire this attempt on the boys' part to make history while in the act of selling it. ”

“ The Great Desire has plenty of charm regarded merely as a story, but I recommend it especially to those who are apt to judge the Americans by their politicians or to assess New York on the basis of the Hearst newspapers. ”

“ Above all the householder who intends to have a fire in his house must keep calm. Immediately the maid rushes into the room to say that the kitchen is on fire, place the book you are reading on the table, remove your slippers and put on a thick pair of heavy boots and a Harris tweed shooting coat. Your next duty is to call the Fire Brigade, and not to meddle with the fire yourself, for very often an amateur completely spoils a fire before the Brigade arrives. ”

“ It was easy to make conversation in a restaurant in the old days, when people kept on coming in in curious uniforms, and the ladies wondered what they were and the men pretended they knew all about them. But all that is dead now, and I think these sweat-badges would supply a serious want. ”

“ Here is a subject which even the flippant cannot long ignore. And a man of the world with a clear head and a mastery of clearer idiom than a professor of political economy usually commands has here said something desperately serious without a trace of dulness. ”

“ I walk much faster; I frown heavily and I look as pale as possible. In the Tube I close my eyes. I hope all this is effective, but as far as I can see the milkman never looks at me, and the builder is always saying to another builder, "'E says to me, 'Wot abaht it?' 'e says, and I says to 'im, 'Yus, wot abaht it?' I says." But it is worth the effort.
Well, that is why that poor man was carrying a typewriter. I wonder why everybody else in the Tube carries an "attaché-case." It has been calculated that if all the attaché-cases which get on to the train at Hammersmith at 9 a.m. ”

“ Even if we haven't got the rollicking boisterous temperament of the born spiritualist, however, there are, it seems, other ways of winning a mild popularity. "If you confess to only a slight knowledge of palmistry," the article continued, "it is often enough to make you the centre of interest at once." ”

“ Even the serious condition of Joe Batt's Arm hardly interests us so much as the challenge to the world's humourists implied in the Committee's selection of their secretary.
[pg 264]
MY ONE ADMIRER.
Of course my wife had made me go to the bazaar. All men go to bazaars either because their wives send them, or in search of possible wives. The men who are never at bazaars are those with humane wives, or the true bachelors. ”

“ A trade journal advertises a new calculating machine which will total up stupendous figures without any human help at all. A correspondent writes to say that in his house he has the identical gas meter which gave the inventor his idea.
The contemporary which refers to the discovery of a gold ring inside a cod-fish as extraordinary evidently cannot be aware that many profiteers who go in for fishing are nowadays using such articles as bait. ”

“ The dear old home has been let to strangers. An interloper occupies the messuage. A foreign master controls the demesne.
To-day especially, when as I write the air is balmy and the skies are blue, it is agonising to feel that our own spring rhubarb is growing crimson only to be toyed with by alien lips, and that the thrush on our pear-tree bough——But no, I am wrong; the pear-tree bough is in the garden of No. 9; it is only the trunk that stands in the garden of No. ”

“ They were ill-rewarded for their pains, for never has a Home Rule debate produced fewer interesting moments. The Chief Secretary was so studiously restrained in explaining the merits of the Bill that the "yawning chasm" which, according to its opponents, the measure is going to create between Southern and Northern Ireland was to be observed in advance on the countenances of many of his listeners. Years ago Mr. Balfour told the Irish Nationalists that Great Britain was not to be bored into acceptance of Home Rule ”