Various

“ If Eunice had been the really nice girl I meant her to be she would have asked Bertram what on earth he meant by saying such things about her husband, and would have told him the shortest cut to the front-door. In which case she might never have got into print.
The fact is the poor heroine of fiction has a hard time of it nowadays. Someone ought to write a treatise on "How to be Happy though a Heroine," or uphold her cause in some way. Twenty-five years ago she lived in a halo of romance. ”

“ The only sign of life for miles is the hero standing on the doorstep looking bewildered and troubled, as well he might, for he knows that he must spend the night in a snowstorm to avoid compromising the heroine. ”

“ THOUGHTS ON "THE TIMES." (From a Train.)
Really the news is very bad this morning. On the front page there are two Foreign crises and a Home one. On the next page there is one Grave Warning and two probable strikes. On every other page there is either a political murder or a new war. It is awful ...
Yet somehow I don't feel depressed. I rather feel like giggling. An empty smoker in the Cornish express—empty except for me! ”

“ I don't quite know what he meant, but Father often talks about Lloyd George, and he must be a beast.
I asked Jack later if he got his present, and he said that he had, but—and here he copied Father's voice so well that I had to laugh—"It is the very last time, my boy; when I was at Oxford I used to consider my Father, and I would have worked in the fields and earned money sooner than have given him bills to pay." Jack said that he knew one of the dons at Oxford who knew Father, and from what he said he thought that Father must have spent as long in the fields as Nebuchadnezzar did. ”

“ I shall say to him, for I see myself with the whole business well in my hands now; "come along to a village I know, whose very name will make you feel at home."
Just outside Luzern we stop at Meggen, but it's not that. Kussnacht gets us well abroad again, and there is nothing particularly homely about Immensee, Arth-Goldau, Steinen, Schwyz or Brunnen. In fact I can see my Premier getting suspicious and wondering what new political move this may be, when suddenly there will burst upon his astonished gaze—
Fluellen. ”

“ Image a Premier arrived at the end of all the beautiful sights to be seen locally, inured to all the magnificent scenery around him, and no longer attracted by the novelty of life abroad, longing, it may be, for just one touch of home. ”

“ We find the heroine flung on a desert island, with the one man above all others in the world that she detests as her sole companion. It is rather rough on her, but often still more rough on other people, as it may necessitate drowning the entire crew and passengers of a large liner just in order to leave the couple alone for a while to get to know each other better. ”

“ The humours of the average farce are so elemental that in the matter of its setting there is small need to worry about geographical or ethnical considerations. Of course, if its locale is French you may have to modify its freedom of thought and speech, but with a very little accommodation to national proprieties you can either transplant the setting of your play or you can leave it where it was and make use of the convention that for stage purposes all Frenchmen have a perfect command of our tongue and idiom. ”

“ In the old days of Peace, Luzern was full of honeymoon couples, and, when Peace and honeymoons and all that sort of nonsense were put a stop to, it became full of German interned prisoners of war. It boasts many first-class hotels. One of them is patronised by the Greek ex-Royal Family. A little unfortunate; but still you cannot expect to come and enjoy yourself in Switzerland without the risk of running [pg 155] into an ex-Royal Family every corner you go round, and, what is more, a Royal Family that wouldn't be ex- if it wasn't for you. ”

“ Nyitray and Mandel have done, for the American stage with an American setting, and then bring it over here and produce it with only one or two actors in the whole cast to illustrate the purity of the American accent, is perhaps to presume rather too much on our generous lack of intelligence.
However we have got Mr. Charles Hawtrey back again and that is what really matters. As a philanderer protesting innocence in the face of damnatory facts we know him well enough; but here we have him innocent and ingenuous as an angel, yet hard put to it to convince anyone but himself of his guilelessness. ”

“ But propaganda of that sort would have no effect on Jane. She would simply say that she never cared to touch herrings and that she did not fancy hemp-seed.
When I consider the cases of George and Jane I am bound to believe either that the Russian moujiks (if this is still the right word) are more docile and tractable than ours, or else that the Soviet régime will need a great deal of adaptation before it can be extended to our English villages. ”

“ Mr. James Carew, who played Edward Early, was conspicuous as the sole male representative of the American language in this American play. The fleeting visions that we had of Miss Mona Harrison as a refractory and venal cook excited general approval. The three protegées of James Smith were only faintly distinguishable in their rather crude banality.
The fun of the farce differed from that of most farces in depending less upon situations than upon dialogue. The First Act, with the situations still to come, was the best. ”

“ Or, on the other hand, the modern writer does not mind killing off, on the barest pretext, a husband who is perfectly sound in wind and limb and had never suffered from anything in his life until the lover appeared. The poor girl will tell you herself that it isn't natural. ”

“ Lloyd George. But I felt that, if I didn't do something about it, Lucerne and Mr. Lloyd George would get away with all the credit and my part in the affair would be overlooked.
The question arose as to what to call that "something"? After a great deal of thought I decided to try you with a short and simple "Lucerne," one of my reasons being that, if you get down to the hard facts, there is no such place.
Try (as the G.P.O. suggests to disappointed envelopes) —try
Luzern. ”

“ Again, the lonely bungalow episode is pretty cheerless for the heroine. She accepts an apparently harmless invitation to spend a week-end with friends in the country. When she arrives at the station there is no one to meet her. After a course of desert islands this ought to arouse her suspicions, but she never seems to benefit by experience. At the bungalow, reached in a hired fly and a blinding snowstorm, she finds the whole household away. ”

“ For that reason, perhaps, the German Government withheld Herr Kautsky's revelations. Now he has published them on his own account, under the title, The Guilt of William Hohenzollern (Skeffington) . A more damning indictment has never been drawn. From the moment of the Archduke's assassination the Kaiser and his advisers determined to make it the pretext for destroying Serbia, and crushing Russia and France if they dared to interfere. Bismarck once said that "never are so many lies told as before a war, during an election and after a shoot." ”

“ Deputations which have some idea of declaring strikes, general strikes and international strikes, if matters are not arranged to their liking, will be received between the hours of ten and twelve, and two and four, at the Kursaal. Saturday afternoons and Sundays will be reserved for quiet walks. I am mapping out some interesting routes, marking with a red dot the spots where the Premier is likely to stop and admire the view, and where you can approach him quietly from behind and involve him in an argument about Russia before he has time to get away. ”

“ Probably he counts on the difficulty of getting at him there, having regard to that terrible bit of the journey Bern—Luzern, which covers sixty miles, takes three hours and involves twenty-four stops, even if you take the mid-day express. There is a train in the afternoon (its number is 5666, and I warn you against it) which takes four hours, though it only stops twenty-four times also. The sinister fact is that all the trains on this route stop as often as they can, which I attribute to that general wave of idleness which is to-day spreading over Europe. ”

“ French family had depended for the dot that should enable their daughter to wed a plutocratic but otherwise detestable suitor. I take it you will hardly need telling that this is the moment chosen by Romance, under the expert guidance of Miss Phyllis Campbell, to bring along an even more wealthy young American, mistaken (of course) for his own chauffeur and working such havoc upon the heart of the heroine that, when the latter accidentally recovered the diamond from its feathered cache, she very sensibly decided to say nothing about it. ”

“ Why can't yer let us fight in peace?"
"'That,' declared Mr. Lloyd George amid loud cheers, 'is one of the most formidable challenges ever given to democracy. Without hesitation every Government must accept that challenge.' 'Certainly we will,' retorted the Prime Minister."—Evening Paper.
No wonder Mr. Lloyd George wants a holiday if he has begun to talk to himself.
"A telegram from Paris says: It is announced here that an agreement has been concluded between France, Great Britain and Italy regarding the delimitation of the open golf championship."—Provincial Paper. ”

“ The Ministry of Food states that the period of normal supplies seems to come round in cycles of four years. Meanwhile the period of abnormal prices continues to come round in cycles of once a week. A movement in favour of postponing the cycle of payment till we get the cycle of plenty is not receiving adequate support from the provision trade.
Agricultural labourers near Peterborough have refused to work with Irishmen on the ground that the latter are troublesome. We always said that sooner or later someone would come round to Mr. Lloyd George's view on this point. ”

“ But beef and mutton she does not touch, nor margarine, and we have to be almost as careful that Jane Harrison has plenty of the right things to touch as about the whole of the rest of the family.
Now here again I think it would be quite possible to induce the people of England in our large industrial centres to ration themselves on boiled herring and bird-seed. We should not use those names, of course. The advertisements on the hoardings would say:—
The Bountiful Harvest of the Sea brought to the Breakfast Table
or
What Makes The Skylark so Happy? ”

“ Generally she begins by being married already. Then her lover comes along to place her in awkward predicaments and put her to no end of inconvenience, very often only to make her realise that she prefers her husband after all. ”

“ I remembered all this as I went to find mother about "Rabbits," and I wasn't quite sure that we should get our present even if we did say it, so I told Angela, and she had a brilliant idea. "We will make Father say 'Rabbits' and give him a present ourselves, and he is sure to give us something [pg 145] in return." Angela is younger than I am, but she often thinks quite clever things like that, and they come in very useful sometimes. ”

“ How jolly the country looks! Superficial, of course; the harvest's ruined; no wheat, no fruit. And unemployment will be very bad. And the more people there are unemployed the more people will strike ... ”

“ And then there is this half a herring and boiled bird-seed arrangement. George Harrison has a sister of eighteen who kindly comes in to do cooking and housework for us every day. She thinks [pg 154] us frightfully queer, and if we bought some herrings and bird-seed and asked her to cook them for us I have no doubt she would oblige, but, though she doesn't much care what we eat, there are a lot of things she doesn't eat herself, and fish is one of them. Porridge, which, I suppose, is a kind of bird-seed, is another. ”

“ It is rather when we come to scattered rural communities that the system seems likely to break down. Take the case of George Harrison in this village. When I first met George Harrison, and he said that he thought the weather was lifting, he was carrying a basket of red plums which he offered to sell me for an old song. ”

“ Never shall have enough, probably—but no matter. If the world is coming to an end, might as well be in a good part of it at the time. And it would be sickening to be snuffed out with an unused return-ticket in one's pocket. ”

“ In a recent riot in Londonderry, it is stated, a number of inoffensive neutrals were set upon and beaten by rowdies of both factions. We have constantly maintained that Irish unity can always be secured when there is something really worth uniting over.
A lighthouse is advertised for sale in The Times. It is said to be just the kind of residence for a tall man with sloping shoulders.
A correspondent asks in the weekly press for a new name for charabancs. ”

“ Asquith's feuilleton, which for so many people has transformed Sunday into a day of unrest, sets up a new method of autobiography, in which the protagonist is, so to speak, both Johnson and Boswell too. Successful models being always imitated we may expect to see a general use of her lively methods ”

“ Jakes liked, or else he wouldn't have married her. Of course a jumper wasn't really the sort of thing that Father could wear, but I thought he might wrap his foot up in it when he next had gout, and besides I shouldn't be wanting it much more myself, as the summer was coming on.
Angela said that she thought that would do well, and she wouldn't mind giving Father her jumper next month if he said "Rabbits," and it would do for Mrs. Jakes' next little girl. ”

“ It seems only fair to point out that The Daily News thought of this as long ago as August, 1914.
Gooseberries the size of bantams' eggs, says a news item, won a prize at the Deeside Horticultural Show. When we remember the giant gooseberries of a decade ago it rather looks as if the nation were losing its nerve. ”