Chapter IV: Part 4

The question, it seems to me, leads directly to the larger issue: Is knowledge often hurtful? I say “often,” not “ever,” for in this life there are always exceptions. For the exceptions we cannot, try we never so carefully, provide. We must, willy-nilly, be guided by general rules. In what other department of life, then, is it even pretended that knowledge, the fullest knowledge, works for ill? Can you think of one? If a traveller were about to set out on a journey through some country where grew in rich luxuriance any number of tempting fruits, beautiful to look upon, delectable to the palate, but charged with deadly poison, and certain seriously to injure or to slay outright whosoever should pluck and eat, would it, or would it not, be desirable that that traveller should be furnished with all the knowledge available as to the number and the nature of these fruits, their habits of growth, the particular places where they were most likely to be found, the antidotes to their several poisons? Would you, if you could, prevent his reading printed treatises descriptive of them, or even poems and dramas that told of them in a poetic or a dramatic way? Who would be most likely to come through the journey unscathed—the traveller who was ignorant, or the traveller who was knowledgable? Surely the questions answer themselves. It is true, of course, that even the best-instructed voyager, hard put to it by hunger or thirst, and face to face with the temptation of some specially seductive fruit, might even so pluck, eat, and perish. The clamour of his senses might prove too urgent for the resistance of his intelligence. But even so, by telling him all there was to tell, you would have done your best for him, wouldn’t you? And what poor chance would the similarly-tempted ignoramus have? Well, now, every young woman is just such a traveller, and life is for her just such a journey.

On my honour, I think I have put the case as fairly and as squarely as I know how. If knowledge be our safeguard, our only safeguard, in every other of life’s journeys, why in the name of all that is rational should ignorance be our best protection in this? Why should there be one little corner in the house of life in which the light shall not be suffered to shine?

You know Mr Findlater. He was here a night or two ago, and was very angry because one of his junior clerks, lately a Board School boy, had been detected in a small forgery. It was a very trifling affair, and did no harm to anyone but the poor silly lad who had been guilty of it. But Mr Findlater was full to the brim of indignation. Not with the lad—I’ll do him justice in that; he didn’t even intend to prosecute, he told me—but with the whole system of national education. “This is what comes of Board Schools,” he declared. “You rate us for teaching these gutter brats to write, and the first use they make of their knowledge is to forge our names to cheques!” He did really, he said just that, and he is a man of not much less than ordinary intelligence! And, of course, if you come to think of it, if no one were taught to write no one could commit forgery, could they? And Mr Findlater’s argument was quite as good as the arguments of those who contend that a young woman’s virtue is best established on a foundation of ignorance.

And now it occurs to me that I have been wasting all the time taken in writing this letter. I feel sure that you put all this yourself, and put it quite as well, to your friends the other night. But then, you see, you have the inestimable advantage of a wise as well as a loving

FATHER.

THE RIGHT SORT OF MAN

THE RIGHT SORT OF MAN

_April 28, 19—._

My surprise is not nearly so great, my dear girlie, as you seemed to anticipate. I told you, you remember, that I was good at guessing, and I had already guessed this, or something very like this. All the same it is a blow, for a blow is none the less a blow because one sees it coming. Indeed, recollections of my sparring days seem to tell me that the blow you see coming, and from which you can escape neither by guard nor duck, is just about the nastiest of all.

Fate is a desperately skilled antagonist. It hammers us and hammers us, and knocks us out at last; but we do manage to get a punch or two back at someone or something now and then ... and that is good to remember. It is curious, isn’t it, that this letter of yours, the subject of which I suppose is Love, should have set me to write about fighting? And yet ... I don’t know ... they are never very far apart, Love and Strife, are they? Love is the great disintegrator, the breaker-up. See how he is coming between you and me now!

You are “not exactly engaged, but ...” I will not quote the end of your sentence, for I know how irritating it is to have one’s words given back to one. Well, it is good of you to refer the final word on the matter to me. Even the most unconventional woman does wisely at great crises to respect the established conventions. Her life is made easier, less stormy so. But there! It was unjust of me to say that. I will—no, will has nothing to do with it—I do believe that in leaving this, to you so intensely personal, matter still open, so that I may have my say on it, you have not been motived by a desire to do the right, the correct thing in such cases, but by a real belief and trust in me. You have done it not because it is always done, but because you are you, and I am I, and we are to each other what we are.

But because you and I and this Third, this Third to me so shadowy, yet so portentous, to you, so substantial, are going to do all the usual things, there is no reason why I should write them to you, is there? So I will not express my gratification and my hopes, and end with a stuffy little lecture inculcating a prudential course of conduct. I will practise up the heavy-father style so as to have it all perfect by the time he (no, I will not give him a capital “h,” though I note that you do) comes to see me. How I hope that at the first glimpse of him I shall feel that I may drop it. Does he expect a heavy father, I wonder. Well, if he does, he shall have one; be sure of that.

The first glimpse of him! And I haven’t had it yet! It is that which has given me this queer indescribable sensation of unreality from which I have been suffering ever since I opened your letter this morning. By the way I posted your other letter to your mother on to her at once; she is staying at Richmond until Friday. One always has that curious, empty feeling when one part of one’s mind fails to realise what another part of one’s mind tells one is a fact. It is thus we feel for the first few moments in the presence of death. We know that it has happened, but we can’t adjust our minds to the knowledge. So to-day with me. I know, or almost know, that your life, the life of all others ... but there, I will not be sentimental, so you fill in the rest ... but your life is to be dominated—well, if not dominated exactly, at anyrate directed for good or ill or half of each, by a man of whom I have never so much as caught sight, of whose very name I am ignorant.

Do you know that you forgot to mention his name? Not that it matters so long as it isn’t anything very distressing. I am not afraid of that, for you know the names to which I object, and which I would rather die than have my name connected with, and I remember that you share my prejudices. We both agreed, didn’t we, that Walter Pater was justified when he refused to vote a Fellowship at Oxford to a man named Juggins or something. So I take it for granted that your future name will be beyond the reach of æsthetic criticism. It ought to be a single syllable name, of course, so as to go rightly with Alexa. Christian names of two or three syllables should always be followed by a surname of one.

But I take it you have seen to that. You could not, I am sure, contemplate a life in which you would suffer from a spasm of artistic horror every time you signed your name.

Whatever he is you know well enough that I shall not be glad of him, don’t you? You know that I shall wish every time I see or think about him that he had never been born. You won’t mind that, because if it were not so you would feel that your father was not one of the right sort of men. Truly, I don’t believe that the right sort of men ever look forward to their daughter’s marriages with anything but fierce distaste. When it comes to the point, I mean. They wouldn’t like them not to be married, and they hate it when they are. From which you will gather what a mistake it is to be the right sort of man, and what supreme folly it is to beget daughters, anyway.

It is rum though, rum and inexplicable, that feeling of savage resentment one has against every other man who aspires to any sort of intimacy with any woman for whom one cares even a little. Of course, one says to oneself that it is because one feels that no other man is half good enough for her. It is quite astonishing how one can lie to oneself. I know, for instance, when I can get myself for a second or two into a reasonable mood, that there must be at least a hundred thousand or so of men in England, not to mention the rest of the world, who are quite half good enough for you, and yet I hate with an incandescent hatred the mere idea, the tenuous probability that you will some day be married. If he, the unnamed and unnamable, were to come into this room now I should, or at least should try to, break him up with my bare hands and send the fragments of him home in a cab.

It was Nero or Caligula, wasn’t it, who expressed the genial wish that humanity had only one head that he might cut it off? Well, I believe that at the bottom of every right-minded man’s heart there is a lurking wish that all femininity were compact and personified in one woman and that she might belong to him. “Turkish?” you smile. Oh, much more than Turkish; primitive rather.

I shall not kill him, Alexa. I shall probably be tremendously nice to him if he wears the right necktie. You might give him a hint about that. One never does do the things one most passionately desires to do—they are always so outrageous those passionately desired things.

Haven’t you often, when sitting at dinner, say, with a lot of depressingly correct people, ached and ached to rip out some hideous, impossible, unspeakable expression, just to watch their shocked, flabbergasted faces; and then to disappear for ever from the cognisance of man? I am sure you have; we all have. But you have never done it, thank heaven, and you know you never will. It is almost irresistible that impulse, isn’t it?

And yet we resist it every time. That is because we are sane. If we yielded we should be mad; that’s all. That is what sanity means, the power to resist the almost irresistible impulse. Well, I am sane, so far. I shall offer him my hand and a chair. Perhaps a cigar. I hope he smokes.

Oh yes, that reminds me. I must say just this. If he does not smoke and if he refuse wine at dinner in favour of water, or even of whisky and soda—a hateful decadent modern habit—then I will have none of him, Alexa, nor shall you. If the worst come to the worst, I will convince him by ocular and tactile demonstration that there is lunacy in our family, and I am quite certain that a fellow who neither smokes nor drinks wine will never have the hardihood or enterprise to face that. It is not that smoking or wine drinking (at dinner) are in themselves virtues, but they are indications of the only temperament and attitude towards life which are compatible with true virtue.

Mind, I will say nothing so widely embracing as that a non-smoker and non-wine drinker is not good for anybody—never mind what I think, but I will not say it. What I will say is that he would not be good enough for you; for one of us. His very presence at dinner and after would be a perpetual reproach, a constant criticism. And you would not like to be faced every evening by a criticism and a reproach.

A man who, in a world of good things, tobacco and wine and other things, abstains, is a man who makes exacting demands upon himself, and a man who makes exacting demands upon himself will inevitably make exacting demands upon his womankind.

And now, while I am about it, I may as well mention one or two other things, one or two other essentials which any man must possess before he can even begin to think of connecting his name with ours. By the way, it is you who will change your name, isn’t it? What an intolerable thought that is. He must be what the Scots call “gleg in the uptak’;” he must divine what you mean almost before you have said it, certainly before you have said it all. He must not, when you happen to speak a trifle elusively, stare at you blankly for half a minute or so, and then say, “I am afraid I don’t quite follow you,” or look it without saying it, perhaps the worst outrage of all, for the remark does at least imply a consciousness of inferiority and a sort of commendable humility.

A truly civilised woman, one of us, would rather live with a Zulu (assegais and all) who understood what she was after, than with a thing in up-and-down collars (and golf sticks) who was for ever asking her to explain herself. Heavens, how I know the look on the face of a woman after she has been married a year or two to that. No, the man who marries you must talk our language, think our thought, or there will be rocks ahead on which you and I and he will get ourselves badly grazed, not to say broken.

Then he must read and admire Henry James. I say must read, not must have read, for if he have not it may be only his misfortune and the fault not of him, but of his upbringing. The novels of Henry James (we have agreed, you remember) are the touchstone of the modern spirit. If a man can’t understand them, or gets bored by them, or wishes they were shorter or less involved, then that man, whatever else he may be, is not of us or even of our time. I would rather see my daughter mated to a megatherium than to a man who could not “make out,” as they put it, the novels of Henry James.

While I was on the subject of tobacco and wine I ought to have added that he must not be “anti” anything to any extent. Not anti-vaccination or anti-vivisection, or anti-clerical, or any of those things about which the faddist rages. I don’t mean that he may not have strong opinions, but he must not carry them to the point of being “anti.” When a man reaches that point it always seems to me he ceases to be human. A husband should be human.

And then—I had nearly forgotten this, that accursed feeling of unreality is so strong upon me to-day—he must be a man whom other women like and who likes all other women, or nearly all, all that count. I know, of course, that his voice changes and takes on another tone when he speaks to you. That is all right. But does it change and take on another tone when he speaks to the other girl? That’s the thing that matters. When he hands a—oh, well, a cup, let us say, to a woman, does he do it in an altogether different way to that in which he would hand a cigar-case to a man? If he doesn’t his wife will soon find herself wishing that he had never handed anything at all to her. A man’s love for “the one woman,” is after all only in a quintessential, concentrated form the emotion he has for all other women, the generalised thing particularised.

I don’t agree with the incorrect saying that reformed rakes make the best of husbands, but I do say that the man who has not in him the potentiality of rakehood should never be trusted with a wife.

But there! What does it all amount to? I write, but all the time I am writing I am conscious that for all practical purposes I might as well go and shoot peas at the sun as direct these wise observations at a girl in the first bloom of what they call love. Of course, I know well enough that just now you see in this intrusive Third all these qualities and attributes upon which I have been insisting. Or if you don’t you think they don’t matter; and that I don’t matter; and that even you don’t matter; that nothing matters but this new magic that bandages your eyes and carries honey to your lips. Could I have chosen for you I would have scaled the heights of heaven if haply I might bring down to you a god, and ... you would not have liked him dear. You would have asked for a man instead. And you would have been right, for you are not a goddess, but a girl and the heart of my heart:—

“And you must twine of common flowers
The wreath that happy women wear,
And bear in desolate darkened hours
The common griefs that all men bear.”

Write to me again soon. Come home soon, very soon. It is a long time that you have been away; twice as long since yesterday.

Your

FATHER.

MODERN MARRIAGE

MODERN MARRIAGE

_May 3, 19—._

MY DEAR ALEXA,—

I resist gallantly the temptation to begin much less formally, much more sentimentally than that; but I feel that marriage is the one subject on which a man may not be sentimental. In matters of marriage it is always sentiment that undoes us.

He called here yesterday afternoon, as by this time you are no doubt aware, for I feel pretty sure that as soon as he left he scribbled a note to you from the nearest post-office. If I know anything about men I know that. I should not be at all surprised if he telegraphed; but I hope not, for it is bad to begin matrimonial enterprises by a present to the Post Office.

So you see I have had a whole evening in which to think him over; a night to sleep upon my thoughts and a morning in which to recast them, as it were. When I tell you that I really did sleep and that I found my breakfast this morning not more hateful than usual, you will realise that all is pretty much as you would wish.

Yes, the man will do. Except that he is a man, and that he wants to marry my daughter, my critical eye can find no serious fault in him. Of course I wish he were dead or in some distant colony—but no, no, I don’t dislike him quite so much as that last would imply—but that wish of mine means little or nothing that need worry you. One so often does wish dead people in whom one can find no fault—indeed, they are more often than not the very people one can do so well without.

I tried him by all the tests. I offered him one of my very best cigars, the sort I never have enough of in the house, and he smoked it like a fellow of taste. Even when we were talking seriously about serious matters—you are a serious matter to him and to me—he held it now and then so that the perfumed smoke could titillate his nostrils. Had it been a bad cigar and he had done that, I should have known him for a charlatan and sent him about his business.

He came in a frock coat too, a frock coat fullish in the skirts—I hope you didn’t put him up to that. Had he worn one of those cut-away things that fasten with one button in the middle of the waistcoat! Words fail me as to what would have happened had he worn one of those.

He knows how to sit in an arm chair without getting into trouble with his elbows or showing too much sock. Has it ever occurred to you, Alexa, that in the matter of the disclosure of ankles a man should be as discreet as a woman?

We did not talk of you all the time. I should have learnt little by permitting that, for the veriest oaf can say the right things about a girl with whom he is in love; but we talked of books, of pictures, of music, of cathedrals, of the things that really matter, and he was all right there.

He has a good deal to learn, but then he has some time in which to learn it; and if you do justice to your upbringing he will not lack a competent tutor. There—that’s the prettiest compliment I have paid you for many a long day.

Your mother was charmed with him. I rather think she is writing to you at this moment to tell you so. I confess that fact does not vastly impress me, because mothers look always with a friendly eye upon their daughters’ suitors, supposing, of course, that they are anywhere near the mark.

Has it ever struck you as queer and rather significant that while women are always anxious for their daughters to marry, men, for the most part, boggle at the thought of it? It looks almost as though your sex got more out of the arrangement than ours, doesn’t it? That if they stand to lose more, as they indubitably do, they stand to win more too?

The inveterate belief of women in the glory and beauty of marriage always stupefies me. I suppose there is not one married woman alive who does not know at least half a dozen others who have come hopelessly to grief in their marriages, and yet they go on believing! Such robust faith is touching and a tremendous compliment to us.

Indeed, it is a wonderful institution this marriage—marriage as it exists among civilised people, I mean: civilised Western people, I should add.

I suppose if a committee of ingenious men and women of the world had met together to devise the scheme of sex relationship best calculated to ensure unhappiness to the two parties concerned, they could not have hit upon anything more likely to secure this object ... well, perhaps not unhappiness exactly, but uncomfortableness, let us say ... than modern marriage, monogamic marriage.

From that point of view it is almost perfection. The object of it would seem to be to destroy as quickly as possible all the feelings with which people start off on it. The end, it would seem, is the negation of the beginning. Rum!

Think, now. What is it that gives the quintessential charm to that state of mind we call being in love? What is the magic of it? You can’t be expected to know just now, because you are not in an analytical mood; emotion of any kind is fatal to accurate analysis.

Well then, I’ll tell you. It is romance—a sense of strangeness, of something to be discovered, of infinite, thrilling, and perilous possibilities.

Why do sisters and brothers not fall in love with each other? Not because to do so would be “unnatural,” not a bit of it, never believe that. Nature has nothing whatever to do with it. It is because they have been brought up together in close and daily intimacy; because there is no romance, no glamour of the undiscovered, no possibilities just beyond the horizon line.

Now marriage, as we know it, is the inevitable slayer of romance. Before the intimacy of marriage romance disappears like a mist wreath in the blazing sun.

Mind, I do not say that in losing romance you lose everything; there are many other things that are worth having, perhaps even more worth having, but you lose romance, and lose it in something less than six weeks.

And when you have lost romance you are no longer “in love.” You may still love and be loved. You do and are, if all things go well with you, both; but you are no longer “in love.” The very feelings which attracted you to start with, which brought you together, are gone, and gone for ever.

That is the stupendous fact of marriage; it kills the thing that made it. It is the outcome of illusion. People in love imagine that marriage is a continuance of the feelings, intensified, which they have for each other before they enter upon it. That, Alexa, is exactly what it is not. It is the very opposite of that.

Most people will tell you—one hears it said all about, especially just now—that the reason why marriage is not the success it might be is that married people “see too much of each other.” There is something in that, no doubt, but there is more not in it, so to speak. It is not, I am convinced, so much because married folk see each other every day that romance takes wings; it is rather because _they can make sure_ of seeing each other every day. It is the sense of security that kills.

I verily believe that an odalisque in an Oriental harem, for whom a visit from her lord is some sort of an event, a thing which may or may not happen on any particular day, has a better emotional time of it than the wife in a suburban villa who knows that her husband will appear at the front door, little black bag and all, ten minutes after she has heard his train puff into the station, or the still more unfortunate lady who can always get speech of him by just calling up the stairs.

Your poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti once told a friend of his, and of mine, that all those exquisite sonnets of his, dedicated to his wife and to wedded love, were written when Mrs Rossetti was away on long visits. That I can well believe, and I believe moreover that they were written not only when she was away, but when he was not at all sure when she would come back.

Once in a little walled town in the South of France I saw a play in which the husband and wife used to make assignations to meet and dine in a private room at a restaurant, although they had an excellent cook at home. It was a silly little play, but the dramatist knew something of human nature and of marriage, all the same. Poor dears, they were trying after something which they could not get, of course, but still, the very fact that they did try proves something, doesn’t it?

Intimacy, security—these are the fatal diseases of marriage. I think I see you gibe a little at the word “security,” and murmur something cynical about divorce. You are right in a way and wrong in another way. One has only to look around one to learn that marriage is by no means synonymous with security; but all of us, when we marry, believe it is, and so the result is the same.

Mention of divorce suggests to me to say this. I don’t believe that the sort of thing which leads to the divorce court, and, where quite uncivilised people are concerned, to the Old Bailey, is half so often, as most suppose, the outcome of wilful incontinence or of sheer naughtiness, no, nor even of the waning of love. It is the passion for something that marriage does not satisfy—the passion for Romance. The unfortunates yearn, yearn with an irresistible yearning, for something to happen, something unusual, something with a spice of danger in it, something which pulls at the heart’s strings, something to make one wake up in the morning with a feeling that the eggs and bacon for breakfast are not the most exciting prospect of the day. Ah, heaven! Don’t we all know it—the coldest, the oldest, the most austere of us!

I formed this opinion entirely out of my own head years ago, and it was curiously confirmed by an experience of three days I once spent in the divorce court. It was when I had that tiresome Chancery suit—you remember, about Ida’s marriage settlement—and I had to waste a lot of time in the law courts.

I could not sit and listen to the Chancery counsel prosing over technicalities, and so I passed the days in a court which touches human nature a trifle more shrewdly and less expensively.

In those three days I saw about a dozen cases tried and disposed of. And what sort of people do you think they were who came there with and against their wills? The gay, the frivolous, the debonnair? Oh, dear me, no; not in the least. I saw not one gallant gentleman, not one lovely lady. On the contrary, they were the dusty, the dowdy, the humdrum, and, this is the odd thing, the middle-aged! They were the kind of women who make their own hats, make them very badly, and talk about their servants at afternoon tea; and of men who go up to town at 8-45 of a morning, and come home by the 6-15. Some of them, of course, had occasionally lost the 6-15, and that was where the trouble began.

It is grossly unfair to the aristocracy to say that it is they who keep the divorce court going. “Aristocratic divorce cases,” as the Radical papers absurdly call them, make not one per cent. of the whole. It is the dull, stodgy middle-class among whom immorality is rampant! And it is just because they are dull, stodgy, and middle-class.

The pleasures, the emotional outlets of art, the distractions which intelligence can always find in the world, are closed against them. Meanwhile, beneath their commonplace domesticity the passion for Romance, though smothered, smoulders on. One fine day, on the most ridiculously inadequate provocation, it bursts into a flame and then—“decree _nisi_ with costs.”

Poor devils, poor, poor devils, they haven’t brains enough to outwit a Slaters’ detective or even a prying housemaid.

Brains, ah! yes. Brains are your stand-by in marriage as in most other of life’s perplexities, Alexa. It is brains that keep you out of matrimonial troubles, and even, when in a slack moment, you do get into difficulties, it is brains that will pull you out of them.

Looking at those of my personal acquaintances who have come bad croppers over their marriages, I find that in every case there has been want of wit on one side or the other, often on both. Brains! That is why I have considerable confidence in your future, my daughter.

One word more. Romance, in-loveness, cannot survive six weeks of the appalling intimacy of marriage. That is past praying for. What shall follow its departure then? Mere emptiness, a tramp across a sandy desert or a treacherous bog? That depends. The thing that should follow is friendship, friendship of a peculiar, a unique, sort; friendship touched by tenderness, mixed with memories, coloured by emotion.

But again remember this—it takes as much brains to build up and to maintain a friendship of that kind as it does to ... well ... more than it does to do anything else in the world so well worth doing. Fools may make satisfactory lovers, only the wise can be lasting friends.

You return on Friday, isn’t it? I shall be at Paddington to meet you. See to it that He is not there—just for this once!

Your

FATHER.

THE SUBTLE SOMETHING

THE SUBTLE SOMETHING

_June 5, 19—._

It is all right, child. I have not a word of blame, not a word of criticism even. You are valiant and original. I am sorry, of course, sorry for you, sorry for him, for myself, for everyone remotely concerned. But I am congratulatory too. I congratulate you, him, and myself. You are prepared for blame of course, for blame from everybody but your own consciousness and your own father. A young woman who engages herself to a man, remains engaged for nearly a month and then “breaks it off” when there is no conventionally agreed-upon cause for the rupture is, in the eyes of the world, a jilt. It can’t be helped. It’s no use grumbling. The world will have its labels—and small blame to it, they spare it the trouble of thinking, of exercising the faculty of discrimination. And we upon whom its labels are stuck, must just grin and wear them. Let us see to it that we do grin and wear them—with a grace.

That “subtle something” of which you can’t say more even to me—there is no need of greater definiteness, I, as always, understand—is the true, almost the only, irremovable hindrance to happiness in marriage, the marriage of sensible people. Anything does to make fools unhappy. It is unpardonable and unforgettable. Unpardonable, because it is not a deed or even a thought or a look; unforgettable because it is always there. And the worst of it is, it can by its very nature discover itself only in intimacy. One has to jump into the water before one finds out with certainty that one can’t swim. That subtle something, so colossal, so inexpugnable yet so elusive! What is it? Where is it? Is it in the blood, or in the brain, or is it some attribute of that unthinkable but must-be-thought-of entity, the Transcendental Ego? I hate to seem so grossly materialist, but I think it is in the blood, and will be discovered some day by chemical analysis, or by an improved microscopy; caught and put into a little bottle.

At present only something finer than chemical analysis, personal perceptiveness to wit, can discern it, and it must be the personal perceptiveness of the one most interested. All the others must needs be the veriest bunglers. That is why I am not kicking myself to any extent for having thought, in my blindness, my inevitable blindness, that he was all right, that he would do. He would have done for me, but how could I know that he would not have done for you? And yet I did just once have the vaguest, dimmest, shadowiest ghost of a suspicion that all was not quite well. It scurried past me that thought, that thought that was not quite a thought, across the darkness of my mind as a small mouse scurries across a dark room. It was one night when you had been seeing him off downstairs and we were all in the drawing-room. When you came back I caught a look upon your face ... no, something less than that ... just a flicker across your lips ... and it made me uneasy, gave me a tiny twinge in that rickety old heart of mine, it kept me awake for an hour or two, as a mouse, fidgeting, has often done.

I am glad of one thing though; that except in the matter of which I could not judge, I did not judge him wrongly. He _is_ made of the right stuff. I had a letter from him last night—a letter from a man to a man. He doesn’t whine, he doesn’t rage, he doesn’t wrangle. He doesn’t even complain. He accepts the inevitable. I think the final test of a man is his attitude in face of the inevitable. I will never show you that letter—of course you would not wish it. I feel in a curious way as though it were I and not you who had hurt him.

Once more then, my daughter, you are right. You have done well. Let no misgivings on that point ever gnaw or even nibble. There are not many things that can justify the breach of a betrothal deliberately entered upon. That subtle something is one of them. Had the case been reversed, had it been he instead of you who had made the discovery, I should have said the same.

Now let the subject be dropped for ever. We will not even refer to it, no, not by a look, when you come home next week.

Your approving

FATHER.

THE END

* * * * *

Camp Fires in the Canadian Rockies.

BY WILLIAM T. HORNADAY.

_With 70 illustrations, from photographs taken by JOHN M. PHILLIPS, and two maps._

_Demy 8vo, 16s. net._

This is the narrative, racy, unconventional, and full of adventurous interest, of an expedition which Mr. Hornaday and Mr. Phillips, the latter a famous mountain climber and camera expert, made into the well-nigh inaccessible mountains of British Columbia in search of the elusive mountain goats and mountain sheep. The expedition was in every way successful, one of its results being a series of extraordinarily interesting and valuable photographs of the mountain goat, taken under great difficulties and dangers at short range. Grizzly bears and other big game were incidents of the chase. Mr. Hornaday’s story of the expedition is full of freshness, charm, and racy humour.

_T. Werner Laurie, Clifford’s Inn, London._

* * * * *

Literary London.

BY ELSIE M. LANG.

With Introduction by G. K. CHESTERTON.

_42 Illustrations by W. J. Roberts._

_Crown 8vo, Cloth gilt, 6s. net._

The object of this book is to add interest to rambles in London by a careful alphabetical record of the homes and haunts of the distinguished literary men and women who are no longer living. In many cases, as is duly noted, the houses themselves are still standing; in others the sites are definitely pointed out, and short extracts are given from biographies, showing with what particular events in the lives of their occupants these residences are identified. London is full of memories, and this volume is an ideal guide book to its literary landmarks.

_T. Werner Laurie, Clifford’s Inn, London._

* * * * *

The Night Side of London.

BY ROBERT MACHRAY.

_With 95 Pictures by_ TOM BROWNE, R.I., R.B.A.

_1s. net._

PREFACE.
PICCADILLY CIRCUS (11 P.M. TO 1 A.M.).
IN THE STREETS.
IN THE STREETS—_continued_ (RATCLIFF HIGHWAY).
“IN SOCIETY.”
STILL “IN SOCIETY.”
NOT “IN SOCIETY.”
AN EAST END MUSIC HALL.
EARL’S COURT.
THE MASKED BALL.
THE SHILLING HOP.
CLUB LIFE.
A SATURDAY NIGHT WITH THE “SAVAGES.”
WITH THE “ECCENTRICS” (3 A.M.).
“LA VIE DE BOHÈME.”
SUNDAY NIGHT AT THE NEW LYRIC.
A “NIGHT CLUB.”
THE NATIONAL SPORTING CLUB.
A SCHOOL FOR NEOPHYTES.
“WONDERLAND.”
NEW YEAR’S EVE AT ST. PAUL’S.
THE HOPPERS’ SATURDAY NIGHT.

_T. Werner Laurie, Clifford’s Inn, London._

* * * * *

_JUST PUBLISHED._

_A Long Complete Novel by_ VICTORIA CROSS.

Life’s Shop Window.

A brilliant young girl awakening into womanhood views herself, and determines that her beauty shall get her anything she wants from the World. She looks into “Life’s Shop Window” and surveys all that her beauty entitles her to. What she buys from Life is brilliantly told by Victoria Cross, in the longest and most important book that remarkable and talented author has yet written.

_Price 6s._

_T. Werner Laurie, Clifford’s Inn, London._

* * * * *

What Men Like in Women.

BY E. J. HARDY,

Author of “How to be Happy Though Married.”

_Crown 8vo. 1s. net, Paper. 2s. gross, Cloth._

“THE MURRAY OF MATRIMONY—THE BAEDEKER OF BLISS.”

An interesting and useful book for young people entering, or about to enter, the marriage state. Mr. Hardy is an expert on this question, and his book is packed with useful information and advice, and leavened with many good stories.

How to Live the Simple Life.

BY CALVIN PATER.

_Crown 8vo, Paper, 1s. net._

CONTENTS:

I. THE NEW CRUSADE.
II. THE SIMPLE-SELFISH LIFE.
III. THE WISDOM OF WAGNER.
IV. THE STOMACH.
V. THE SOUL.
VI. THE MIND.
VII. THE BODY.
VIII. MAMMON AND MANNERS.

_T. Werner Laurie, Clifford’s Inn, London._

* * * * *

Six Women.

By VICTORIA CROSS.

_Price 6s._

_THE QUEEN says of Victoria Cross’s “Six Women”_:

“What is so marked in these stories is the beauty of the writing. Her atmosphere is delightful. The Eastern stories are full of the colour and the atmosphere of the East. No one can do anything but envy the author’s touch in the description of Eastern buildings and gardens. It makes no difference to Victoria Cross whether she is writing of India or Damascus or Omdurman, she invests them all with an atmosphere which is not only enchanting but carries the stamp of truth on it.”

_LITERARY WORLD_:

“Full of powerful writing and fertile imagination.”

_SCOTSMAN_:

“Studies in the passions of love and jealousy admirably arranged.”

_MADAME_:

“‘Six Women’ is written with the artistic touch which is associated with the best French fiction, and which is too often lacking in English novels. It is only the prudish and the prurient who will object to ‘Six Women.’”

_T. Werner Laurie, Clifford’s Inn, London._

* * * * *

T. WERNER LAURIE’S

Cathedral Series.

This Series is probably the most artistic, scholarly, complete, and cheap set of books yet published. Infinite pains have been expended on every branch of reproduction employed.

“The Daily News” said of the “Cathedrals of Northern France”:—“In paper, print, binding, and reproduction, this record is a joy to the reader.”

SOME OPINIONS OF THE PRESS ON “THE CATHEDRALS OF ENGLAND AND WALES.”

“Of each Cathedral an admirable historical sketch is given, detailing its architectural growth, and the volumes make admirable handbooks for those who wish to study our English Cathedrals intelligently.”—_Literary World._

“Mr. Bumpus’ book is a valuable guide in the case of these buildings, not only describing them very fully, but also pointing out what parts of them are original and what new. Mr. Laurie is to be heartily congratulated on this series, which is illustrated by numerous plates from good photographs.”—_Athenæum._

“Mr. Bumpus’ style has a refreshing air of the enthusiastic ecclesiologist, and of that ‘Domine, dilexi decorum domus Tuæ,’ which is ill replaced by the cold professionalism of the mere expert.”—_Saturday Review._

“The description of St. Paul’s, surrounded by the City church steeples, is a magnificent tribute to Wren.”—_Yorkshire Post._

LIST OF SERIES.

1. The Cathedrals of Northern France. By FRANCIS MILTOUN. With 80 illustrations from original drawings, and many minor decorations, by BLANCHE MCMANUS. 1 vol., decorative cover, 7¾ × 5¼ × 1⅜. Cloth gilt, 6_s._ net.

2. The Cathedrals of Southern France. By FRANCIS MILTOUN. Cloth gilt, 6_s._ net.

*3, 4, 5. The Cathedrals of England and Wales. By T. FRANCIS BUMPUS, Author of “Summer Holidays Among the Glories of France.” With many plates and minor decorations, and specially designed heads and tailpieces to each chapter. 3 vols., 8vo, decorative cover, cloth gilt, 6_s._ net each; in leather, 10_s._ 6_d._ net per vol.

*6. The Cathedrals of Northern Germany and the Rhine. By T. FRANCIS BUMPUS. With many plates and minor decorations. 8vo, cloth gilt, 6_s._ net; leather, 10_s._ 6_d._ net.

7. The Cathedrals of Northern Spain. By CHARLES RUDY. Many illustrations. 6_s._ net.

8. The Cathedrals of Northern Italy. By T. F. BUMPUS. 6_s._ net. 40 plates. [_In preparation_

* _These volumes are issued also in leather binding (bound by the Oxford Press) at 10s. 6d. each net._

_T. Werner Laurie, Clifford’s Inn, London._

* * * * *

_RECENT NOVELS. 6s. each._

The Cubs.

By SHAN F. BULLOCK. 6_s._

Six Women.

By VICTORIA CROSS. 6_s._

The Poison Dealer.

By GEORGES OHNET. 6_s._

Thurtell’s Crime.

By DICK DONOVAN. 6_s._

Rowena.

By AGNES GIBERNE. 6_s._

The Mummy and Miss Nitocris.

By GEORGE GRIFFITH. 6_s._

_Three Books by James Huneker._

Melomaniacs. 6_s._

Visionaries. 6_s._

Iconoclasts: A Book of Dramatists. 6_s._ _net._

Illuminating critical studies of modern revolutionary playwrights.

_T. Werner Laurie, Clifford’s Inn, London._

* * * * *

_The Novel Of The Season._

The Sinews of War.

BY EDEN PHILLPOTTS AND ARNOLD BENNETT.

_With cover design by Charles E. Dawson. 6s._

A thrilling story of mystery and imagination. It is an attempt to show how, given immense histrionic genius, a man without principle might use it to the confusion of Society and be responsible for seemingly inexplicable mysteries. The romance deals with modern days in London, and a phase of life hidden largely from Londoners themselves. An astonishing murder opens the way to the story, and the coroner’s inquest introduces to the reader one of the most original characters in modern sensational fiction. From the lodging-houses, clubs, and theatres of the metropolis, the scene changes to London Docks, thence to mid-ocean, and finally to the West Indies. There the mystery of “The Sinews of War,” becomes at last unravelled and a title that will puzzle the reader until the end, is explained.

_T. Werner Laurie, Clifford’s Inn, London._

* * * * *

_TWO BOOKS BY LOUIS BECKE._

Sketches in Normandy.

BY LOUIS BECKE,

Author of “By Reef and Palm.”

_Illustrated, Cloth gilt, 6s._

It is quite a new departure for Mr. Louis Becke to take as his theme stories of Normandy life, but his three years’ wanderings along the coasts of Normandy and Brittany, and among the fisher-folk, has resulted in his giving us some charming and amusing pictures.

Notes from my South Sea Log.

BY LOUIS BECKE.

_Crown 8vo, cloth gilt, 6s. net._

An account of Mr. Becke’s sporting and fishing adventures whilst supercargo in the South Seas, together with many notes on the habits and superstitions of the Islanders.

_T. Werner Laurie, Clifford’s Inn, London._

* * * * *

“_The Up To Date Doctor._”

Modern Medicine for the Home.

BY ERNEST WALKER, M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P. (Lond.)

_Crown 8vo, Paper 1/- net. Cloth 1/6 net._

This work is scientific and up to date; all technical and misleading terms are omitted, and the diseases are classified alphabetically and under their popular names.

The treatment is scientific and simple and nothing is advised that cannot be carried out at home.

The description of complicated symptoms and treatment is avoided.

The signs of severe illnesses are given, so that the disease may be recognised and the patient comforted by simple home remedies till skilled help is obtained.

The want of a little medical or surgical knowledge has led to the loss of many lives which might have been saved, and this book conveys to the unskilled reader in a few trenchant and simple sentences the best way to act in all emergencies.

An invaluable volume and one which ought to be in every home library.

_T. Werner Laurie, Clifford’s Inn, London._

* * * * *

_THE MUSIC LOVER’S LIBRARY._

VOL. I.

Chats on Violins.

BY OLGA RACSTER.

_Fully Illustrated. Crown 8vo, cloth gilt, 3s. 6d. net._

Under this title are grouped a series of pleasant chats telling the early history of the violin, and also dealing with all the better known forms of the violin. All the great makers, from Gaspar di Salo, Maggini, Amati, to Stradivarius are described, the whole being interspersed with many anecdotes about makers and players, and useful chapters on violin music and playing.

The pictures are delightfully uncommon, comprising as they do the representations of all the ancient members of the violin family from the ninth century. The whole work is full of interesting information and is written in a bright and unconventional manner.

Stories from the Operas.

BY GLADYS DAVIDSON.

_Illustrated. Crown 8vo, cloth gilt, 3s. 6d._

_First Review._

“Each Opera is adequately and interestingly dealt with. It
is the best book of its kind we have seen.”—_Sheffield Daily
Independent._

A charming series of tales arranged from the Grand Operas. Few people seem to know the actual stories contained in the great music dramas of Wagner and others.

Most of them are very beautiful and interesting, and this volume contains twenty of the more popular tales simply written and in accordance with the libretto.

_IN PREPARATION_:

Vol. III. “Chats on the Violoncello.” OLGA RACSTER.
Vol. IV. “Chats with Music Lovers.” DR. PATTERSON.
Vol. V. “Stories from the Operas.” Second Series.

_T. Werner Laurie, Clifford’s Inn, London._

* * * * *

_NEW NOVELS. 6s. each._

The Last Miracle.

By M. P. SHIEL.

This long-since-promised novel of Mr. M. P. Shiel is the third of the trilogy of novels which commenced with the “Lords of the Sea,” and was continued by the much-translated “Purple Cloud,” all the three purporting to be the words dropped from the lips of a clairvoyant in her swoons, as memorandumed in the note-books of her doctor.

A Russian Coward.

By FRED WHISHAW.

The story gives a vivid picture of the corruption of the Grand Dukes and Army Contractors, and is altogether a thrilling, sensational, and unhackneyed story.

The Financier’s Wife.

By FLORENCE WARDEN.

Miss Warden takes the City for her theme, and her story is reminiscent of a recent financial crash which paralysed Lombard Street for some time.

The character of the great financial magnate is wonderfully drawn, and the description of his downfall is most graphically told.

A Widow by Choice.

By CORALIE STANTON and HEATH HOSKEN.

The principal action of this story takes place in Italy—in Florence and near Perugia; and the book is a human document peopled with living characters. Readers who want a glowing and absorbing story of Italy should get this book.

A King’s Wife.

By HÉLÈNE VACARESCO.

_Crown 8vo. Cloth. Decorated Cover. 6s._

This is a novel which will assuredly create a great sensation. The brilliant authoress was barely 18 when the Academy crowned her first volume of poems, “Chants d’Aurore.”

The close friendship between the Queen of Roumania, Carmen Sylva, and Hélène Vacaresco is well known, and also the romance of the projected marriage between the young poet and the royal prince of Roumania; this project was abandoned for State reasons, but it created an idyllic and legendary atmosphere round the authoress.

Her book, while pure fiction, may be said to mirror the mode of living and sentiments of certain royal personages, and probably no more intimate picture of Court Life from the inside has ever been published. It is a story full of passion and interest.

The Salving of a Derelict.

By MAURICE DRAKE.

The _Daily Mail_ offered a prize of £100 for the best novel, and over 600 competitors sent in manuscripts. The prize was awarded to this thrilling and romantic adventure story.

Lucy of the Stars.

By FREDERICK PALMER.

With Four Illustrations.

FIRST REVIEWS.

“Delightful reading—the study of the central figure is work of
which the author may well be proud.”—_Country Life._

“This is a remarkably clever novel, and Lucy is as delightful a
personage as any of recent fiction.”—_Dundee Advertiser._

“We have not recently read anything which left upon us so
profound an impression of the writer’s ability.”—_Glasgow
Herald._

“Far above the average.”—_Birmingham Post._

“Good, sincere, and readable.”—_Belfast N. Whig._

The Arncliffe Puzzle.

By GORDON HOLMES.

A Thrilling Detective Romance of Love, Mystery, and Murder.

FIRST REVIEWS.

“An exceptionally ingenious murder mystery.”—_Literary World._

“The book must be read at a sitting; it is impossible to lay it
down until it is finished.”—_Madame._

“The characters are well contrasted—the solution emotionally
effective.”—_Athenæum._

“This vivacious and attractive record.”—_Glasgow Herald._

“Stirring and well contrived.”—_Morning Leader._

“Spirited and well written—a thoroughly readable
book.”—_Speaker._

“What one looks for are a strong plot, sustained interest, and
good situations, and Mr. Holmes gives these to his readers in
full measure.”—_Manchester Guardian._

_T. Werner Laurie, Clifford’s Inn, London._

* * * * *

_5th Thousand now ready, with additional Chapters on MISERY BRIDGE AND SPECIMEN HANDS._

THE NEW LAWS OF BRIDGE AND COMMENTS THEREON.

The Complete Bridge Player

BY EDWYN ANTHONY (“CUT CAVENDISH”).

_Crown 8vo, 244 pages, 2s. 6d. net._

A bright and cheery guide, carrying the reader through Bridge in all its varying stages, and finally landing him on the high road to success.

Although the treatise will be readily understood by beginners, the more advanced player will derive considerable pleasure and profit from a study of its contents.