E.V.L.

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    “Rufford Abbey is, of course, a wonderful old place, and all
    the front, from gable to gable, is genuine tenth-century, built
    in 1139.”

     Sunday Times.

It looks as if the ca’ canny idea was not so new as we thought it.

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[Illustration:  Lady with Pram (who has been pointing out to newcomer the beauties of the neighbourhood, where a strike is threatened).  “THAT’S ONE OF THE ’OT ’EADS.”]

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AT THE PLAY.

“EVERY WOMAN’S PRIVILEGE.”

When Dahlia refused the hand of a wealthy middle-aged nut, with faultless knickerbockers and a gift for lucubrated epigrams, preferring to throw in her lot (platonically) with a young and penniless social reformer, we took no notice of those who feared a scandal ("scandals are not what they were,” as she said), nor of the girl’s assertion that she had no use for the alleged romance of marriage.  We were confident that the little god whose image, with bow and arrow, stood in the garden of Dahlia’s ancestral home, would put things right for us in the end.  Yet we were not greatly annoyed when he made a mess of his business and married her to the wrong man; for in the meantime such strange things had been allowed to occur and the right man had proved such a disappointment that we didn’t much care what happened to anybody.

It was the rejected lover, Mortimer Jerrold, who conceived two bright ideas for conquering her independence of mind, apparently for the benefit of his rival.  First he contrived to get Harold Glaive, the young socialist, selected as a candidate for Parliament, hoping (if I read the gentleman’s motive rightly) that his probable failure would touch the place where her heart should have been.  This scheme did not go very well, for he was chosen to contest the seat held by Dahlia’s own father (which caused a lot of trouble), and in the result beat him.

Meanwhile Jerrold had had an alternative brain-wave.  He thought that if he pinched the latchkey of Dahlia’s Bloomsbury flat, broke in at night, and made a show of assaulting her modesty he could prove to her that she was only a poor weak woman after all.  Nothing, you would say, could well have been more stupid.  Yet, according to Mr. HASTINGS TURNER’S showing (and who were we to challenge his authority?) it came off.  We were, in fact, asked to believe that a girl who had protested her freedom from all sense of sex was suddenly made conscious of it by the violence of a man whose advances, when decently conducted, had left her cold; and from that moment developed an inclination to marry him.  An assault by a tramp or an apache would apparently have served almost as well for the purpose.  If this is “Every Woman’s Privilege” it is fortunate that so few of them get the chance of exercising it.