Cheerful Householder (to burglar). "By the way, when you go downstairs you might let the cat in; she's been spoiling my sleep."
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
If memory serves me, the publishers of World's End (Hurst and Blackett) described its theme as one of unusual delicacy, or words to that effect. I should like to reassure them. The particular kind of marriage of convenience which it concerns (marriage for the convenience of the wronged heroine, by which the virtuous hero gives his name to the child of the villain) may be, indeed is, a delicate matter, but—in fiction at least—by no manner of means unusual. Nor can I see that its present treatment by Amélie Rives (Princess Troubetzkoy) lends it any degree of novelty. No, let me be just; perhaps Richard Bryce, the wicked betrayer, does strike a somewhat new note, at least in his beginnings. Richard was the product of art super-imposed upon dollars. He was so cultured that the humanity in him had dwindled to a negligible quantity; and thus, when poor Phoebe wanted him to "do the right thing by her," he sent her instead some charmingly modern French verse—which she could not understand—and finally took ship for Europe in mingled alarm and boredom. You will have gathered that the scene is laid in America. Perhaps this explains the hero. Owen Randolph was one of the strong and silent. He was so silent that, though he knew perfectly well all that had happened, he married Phoebe, and allowed that unhappy lady to suffer chapters of agonized apprehension as to his attitude, when half-a-dozen words would have set her at ease on the subject. He was, moreover, so strong that, when eventually the theme of their relations with Phoebe did crop up between himself and Richard, the latter spent some months in hospital as a consequence. However, he recovered, and things were thus able to reach the kind of ending which was expected of them. There are parts of World's End that are worthy of a better whole, but that is the best I can say for it.
I believe that Paul Moorhouse (Long) was never really predestined to end unhappily and that his suicide was a conclusion as little premeditated by the author as it was apparently by the hero. If such ends must be, they should be a climax demanded by relentless logic: some sort of culminating event should occur which, added to what has gone before, leaves no alternative. Paul, however, had survived for years under the stress of all the circumstances which finally constrained him to make an end of himself; and, had he stayed the course—only another hour or so—he would have found that all had turned out for the best and that adequate arrangements had been made for his permanent happiness. No doubt these things happen in real life and I cannot accuse Mr. George Wouil (a most discerning author) of any inhuman treatment of his puppet; yet I wish that he had been more kindly disposed and had spared me a bitter disappointment. Having known Paul, man and boy, for upwards of ten years, I had become sincerely attached to him; as assistant time-keeper, foreman and works-manager he showed a spirit true to the real Black Country type. He had his moments of weakness when he went astray after the manner of his kind; but he always became master of himself again and, when he had to, paid like a man the price of his misdeeds, never pausing to dis-
