“Men’s experience,” she said; “it doesn’t count.  You’ve often said that smoking-room stories are the dullest in the world.”

“How you do dart about,” I said, “from subject to subject.  Just now you were in a polling-booth and now you’re in a smoking-room.”

“And heartily ashamed to be found there—­stale tobacco and staler stories.  Why have a smoking-room at all when everybody’s grandmother has her own cigarette case and her own special brand of cigarettes?”

“We ought rather,” I said, “to have two smoking-rooms to every house, one for me and the likes of me and the other for the grandmothers.”

“Segregating the sexes again!  Surely if we have mixed bathing we may have mixed smoking.”

“And mixed voting,” I said.

“That is no real concession.  We have wrung it from you because of the force and reasonableness of our case.”

“Say rather the force and Christabelness of your case.”

“Anyhow, we’ve got it.”

“And now that you’ve got it you don’t really care for it.”

“We do, we do.”

“You don’t.  It’s not one of the important subjects you and your friends talk about after you’ve quite definitely got up to go and said good-bye to one another.”

“What,” said Francesca, “does this man mean?”

“He means,” I said, “those delightful and lingering committee meetings, when you have nearly separated and suddenly remember all the subjects you have forgotten.”

“Now,” she said, “you are really funny.”

“I’m a man and can only do my best.”

“That’s the pity of it; but now you’ve got the women to help you.”

“So I have.  Well, au revoir in the polling-booth.”

“Anyhow, à bas the smoking-room.”

R.C.L.

* * * * *

[Illustration:  WAR ECONOMY.

Aunt Liz.  “WHERE YER GOIN’, TINY?” Tiny.  “PICTURES.”

Aunt Liz.  “GOT YER MONEY?” Tiny.  “NO.”

Aunt Liz.  “WHAT YER GOIN’ TO DO, THEN?” Tiny.  “SHOVE IN.”

Aunt Liz.  “ALL RIGHT.  MIND YER DON’T GET RUNNED OVER.”]

* * * * *

“Hot pennies and halfpennies were thrown from the windows at a West Hartlepool wedding party.  One fell down the back of a schoolboy, burning him, and has been awarded £5 damages.”—­Eastern Dally Press.

And did the poor boy get nothing?

* * * * *

“The Lower House of the Convocation of Canterbury has a very full agenda.  Reports of the respective Joint Committees on the Royal Letters of Business, Purity of Life and the Revision of the Dictionary ... will be taken into consideration; and, afterwards, several motions on a variety of topics will be brought forward.  One of these begs the War Office to provide some means of protecting, when necessary, ladies of education working in munition factories ’from the profane language and swearing of the officials under whom they work.’”—­Church Courier.

The dictionary certainly needs revising if this sort of language appears in it.