Lures of Life

sly over the tea-table. Mrs. Alinson is a lady magnificent in bulk, energetic in action, torre

d me soundly in her loud, pushful, stridulant voice, which commands attention: "Mr. Drake is not a desirable acquaintance for you to pursue, my dear. He don

s and whom nobody gainsays; a lady the final arbiter of taste in "nice people" who opens the door to a new-comer and no man shuts, who shuts the door on a new-comer and no man opens. I accepted her dictum as good cu

in music-halls or wasting investments in theatre-land, I am impartial in my pleasures, and can take a shilling seat in a picture palace with clean conscience and merry heart. In the cinema we met our dear friend Lady ----, who was enjoying the moving pictures. She invited us to her reception on the

was a thing to be shunned? Was she a false goddess, or no goddess at all? She pictured herself the controlling hand which steered the current of gay life in our midst. Was she at the helm, or was it a mild

lves as others see us. We each observe the interesting object that engages our attention from different points of the compass. We see our good points of character and make the best of them; our neighbours detect our little sins and make the worst of them. So we clothe ourselves in sunlight and paint our neighbours drab. Mrs. Alinson, fortunate woman, had no glimmering idea what other people thought of her; it was not given her to see herself as others see her. She lives

Gladstone. "It must be a very painful thing to you, Mr. Bright," he hazarded, "that after all these years of comradeship you two should sever your connection?" "Indeed it is," replied Bright with a sigh; "to think that after we have so long wor

fectionately of you, Mr. Gladstone." "Did he indeed?" replied the sitter sorrowfully. "It was a cruel blow that parted us--and on so clear a question, too! Tell me, Mr. Holl"--and here his lips

ts and flickering shadows of his character dance before us. We chase the shadow, and think we ca

of a six-shilling novel. The novelist is a crude, fumbling workman at his trade. His hand is too clumsy for his tools. He dissects his paper dolls as they pass before him in a paper world, but the tangled, unbalanced, erratic human being pulsing with mystic life, even his next-door neighbour, baffles him on th

ly papers, could see themselves now, as we see them, promoted to illustrious companionship with the mighty dead, their heads would s

They knew themselves to be good workmen who did a good day's work for a fair day's pay, and then, like other honest day-labourers, at nightfall, with clean consciences, they la

he affairs of the day, with a little gift of the pen or some queer scientific hobby that absorbs him. In this swift age of ours Time and Space are being brought to heel in masterly control, but our neighbours remain mysterious to us as Adam was to Eve until the affair of the apple found

. He had no trusty Boswell at his elbow to note his pothouse wit and succulent wisdom, sparks from the fire of his genius, flung off impromptu in merry moments at the Mermaid

mpiled as it was from the stage versions--the manuscripts that the players used in the theatres. Those well-thumbed dog-eared copies of the plays, very interesting documents to own if one could be placed on the market to-day: worn and torn, scored with erasures, interlined with emendations, stained with spilt wine and small beer, greasy with handling of midnight study, and crumpled after pouching in the players' pockets cheek by jowl with in