She. "This be a terrible war, Doctor."
He. "Is it, indeed."
She. "It's a pity someone don't catch that there old Kruger."
He. "Ah, you mean the Kaiser."
She. "Aw—changed his name, has he—deceitful old varmint?"
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
In The Wife of Sir Isaac Hannan (Macmillan) that impenitent pamphleteer, H. G. Wells, returns yet again to the intriguing subject of marriage, and in a vein something nearer orthodoxy. Not, certainly, that worthy stubborn orthodoxy of accepted unquestioned doctrine, or that sleeker variety of middle-aged souls that were once young, now too tired or bored to go on asking questions, but an orthodoxy rather that is honest enough to revise on the evidence earlier judgments as too cocksure and hasty. Sir Isaac Harman was a tea-shop magnate, and a very pestilent and primitive cad who caught his wife young and poor and battered her into reluctant surrender by a stormy wooing, whose very sincerity and abandonment were but a frantic expression of his dominating egotism and acquisitiveness. Wooing and winning, thinks this simple ignoble knight, is a thing done once and for all. Remains merely obedience in very plain and absolute terms on the part of lady to lord, obedience which, in the last resort, can be exacted by withholding supplies—not so uncommon a form of black-mail as it suits the dominant sex to imagine. Lady Harman's emancipation does not take the conventionally unconventional form, for some deeper reason, I think, than that her sententious friend and would-be lover, George Brumley, could not altogether escape her gentle contempt; indeed, she recognises Sir Isaac's claims upon her for duty and gratitude in a way which modern high-spirited priestesses of progress would scarcely approve. She fights merely for a limit to the proprietorship, for the right to a separate individuality, the right to be useful in a wider sphere (a phrase that stands for so much that is good and less good). Mr. Wells has realised this gracious, shy and beautiful personality with a fine skill. It is no mean feat. He might so easily have made a dear mild ghost. And oh if ladies of influence who regiment their inferiors in orderly philanthropic schemes had some of the wisdom and tolerance of Lady Harman in her dealings with the tea-shop girls. You see one instinctively pays Mr. Wells the serious compliment of assuming that he has something material to say about the things which matter.
As a demonstration of the irony of history, I can hardly imagine a better subject for romance at the present moment than the fortunes of William of Orange, and if Miss Marjorie Bowen's Prince and Heretic (Methuen) shows some traces of having been rather hastily finished it is easy to pardon this defect. The alchemist's assistant, part seer and part quack, whom she introduces into the earlier part of the story foretells the violent deaths of the young princes of the house of Nassau and the ravaging and looting of the Netherlands by Alva, Defender of the Catholic Faith and servant of the House of Hapsburg; but he cannot conjure up out of his crystal the sight of a Catholic Belgium suffering these things, three hundred and fifty years later, at the hands of a Lutheran King allied with a Hapsburg and fighting for the sake of no cause but his own vanity. Most of the action takes place in Brussels—a Brussels placarded with squibs against Cardinal
