* * * * *
Was it not Mr. ALBERT CHEVALIER who used to sing some hortatory lyrics upon the inadvisability of introducing your donah to a pal? Something of this sort, mutatis mutandis in the matter of sex, might stand as the moral of That Red-headed Girl(JENKINS). Because no sooner had Julia, the heroine, got herself engaged to Dick than the arrival of auburn-tressed Sheila so dazzled the youth that in less time than it takes to write he had called the engagement off and prepared to marry the new-comer. However, to square matters, Sheila now jilted him; whereupon he fled back to Julia (meanwhile, though he knew it not, legatee of twelve thousand a year) and promptly married her. Which was entirely satisfactory, save from the view-point of Miss LOUISE HEILGERS, who was left with her hero and heroine united and the whole affair at an end before she had passed Chapter XII. Here however intervened a very touching instance of filial piety. Springing to the rescue of her author, and with no other possible motive or excuse than that of helping Miss HEILGERS towards a publishable six-bobs-worth, the resourceful Julia determined to think that Dick had married her for the money of whose existence he was palpably unaware. He, on his part, not to be outdone, played up to the situation thus created with a lunatic behaviour that gave it the support it wanted. I need not, of course, insult your intelligence with any indication of the end. A happy, flagrantly artificial little comedy of manners, as exhibited by the characters in polite pre-war fiction, and nowhere else.
* * * * *
[Illustration: Resigned Patriot. “DO WE DRAW FOR THIS, MY DEAR?”]
* * * * *
INTENSIVE WARFARE IN PALESTINE.
“On a front of
fourteen yards, this position extends by a series of
redoubts and trenches
eleven miles south-east of Gaza.”—Isle
of
Man Times.
* * * * *
“Lord Devonport
... hoped their Lordships would realise that the
stable necessaries of
life had been brought under Government
control.”—Belfast
News-Letter.
They do realise it. You should hear their language about oats.

