The Prospective Mistress.  “OH!  B-BUT IF YOU THINK THE PLACE WOULD OTHERWISE SUIT YOU I DARESAY WE COULD BOARD THE CHILDREN OUT.”]

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OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

(BY MR. PUNCH’S STAFF OF LEARNED CLERKS.)

Miss ETHEL SIDGWICK (long life to her as one of our optimist conquerors!) still keeps her preference for the creation of charming people and her rare talent for making them alive.  But I wonder if she is not refining her brilliant technique to the point of occasional obscurity of intention.  At least I know I had to re-read a good many passages to be quite sure what was in fact intended.  An implied compliment, no doubt; but are all readers so virtuous? ("or so dull?” quoth she). Hatchways (SIDGWICK AND JACKSON) is one of those happily comfortable, just right houses with a hostess, Ernestine, whom everybody loves and nobody (save her husband, and he not in this book) makes love to.  Holmer, on the other hand, is the adjoining ducal mansion with a distinctly uncomfortable dowager still in command who can’t even arrange her dinner-parties and fails to marry her sons to the right people.  Perpetually Hatchways is wiping the eye of Holmer, and this touches the nerve of the great lady.  Her sons, Wickford, the authentic but hardly reigning duke, and Lord Iveagh Suir, the queer impressionable (on whom the author has spent much pains to excellent effect), both take their troubles to Ernestine.  And a young French aviator (this is a pre-War story), guest at Hatchways, analyses and discusses situations and characters from his coign of privilege—­a device adroitly handled by the discreet author, who adds two charming girls, coquette Lise, Iveagh’s first love, and wise, loyal, perceptive Bess, whom he found at last.  To those who appreciate subtle portraiture let me commend this study....  I feel just as if I had been for a long week-end at Hatchways, anxiously wondering, as I write my “roofer,” if I shall be so lucky as to be asked again.

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I think there is little doubt that you will agree with me in calling The Flaming Sword (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) as noble and absorbing a story of fine work finely done as any that the War has produced.  It is the history, told by herself, of Mrs. ST. CLAIR STOBART’s Red Cross Mission “in Serbia and Elsewhere.”  The frontispiece, Mr. GEORGE HANKIN’s moving picture of The Lady of the Black Horse (a name always to be honoured among our Allies), catches the spirit of the heroic tale and prepares you for what the Lady herself has to tell.  Mrs. STOBART is no sentimentalist; fighting and the overcoming of obstacles are, one would say, congenial to her mettle; time and again, even in the midst of her story of the terrible retreat, with the German guns ever thundering nearer, she can yet spare a moment to strike shrewdly and hard for her own side