ENTERTAINING FOR THE YOUNG The Etiquette by P. G. Wodehouse. Vanity Fair (February 1915) IN planning entertainments for the younger set it cannot be too clearly pointed out that the really smart child hostess must not insult her guests with the sugg estion of parlor games. Dancing is de rigueur, provided the dances are strictly modern and do not include such atrocities as the polka or the Sir Roger de Cover ley. But to ask Harold, who has done Europe twice by himself, and Amlie, who is p ractically engaged to an infant Marquis, to stoop to Kiss-in-the-ring and Blind Mans Bluff and Hunt-the-slipper is to ruin yourself socially in the best juvenile circles of New York. I shall never forget the lookjust one lookwhich little Clare nce G. van Doop gave a misguided conjurer who so far forgot himself as to extrac t a hard-boiled egg from a head which will one day control two railroads and a p ork-packing business which has already been denounced at three hundred and fifty -seven Socialist meetings, in this country alone. CARD-GAMES are admissible, provided the the stakes are sufficiently high to prev ent players from becoming bored. Poker and auction bridge are always safe, but d o not suggest Snap, or Animal Grab for lima beans. One of the saddest cases I ca n recall is that of little Angela Goldinger, who at one time showed promise of a n exceedingly bright career as a hostess. Poor child, in spite of an excellent s ocial education, she could not succeed in eradicating an infantile passion for a game calledI hate to write itOld Maid. This degraded pastime she insisted on forc ing upon her guests during nearly the whole of an evening. Too well-bred to obje ct, they set their teeth and went through with it like heroes and heroines; but it finished Angela socially. You never see her anywhere nowadays. As ss. at ter regards smoking, much must be left to the discretion of the individual hoste Where there is little or no formality in the party, cigarettes may be passed table: but otherwise, of course, the girls will smoke in the sitting-room af the men have left them.

A roulette-wheel and lay-out for the older boys is no bad thing, and has often s aved a party which showed dangerous signs of hanging fire. It has, however, been known to lead to an occasional unpleasantness. I remember little Reginald Joppe rson, the son of the Fruit Biscuit magnate, completely forgetting his breeding a nd accusing the heir to the Linoleum trustwho happened to be acting as bank at th e momentof having fixed the wheel when zero turned up three times in succession. On that occasion blood was actually spilt, and so serious was the episode consid ered that several of his clubs requested Reginalds resignation. As to the drama, the modern child prefers plays with a little zip to them. Almos t anything that has been denounced by the Parents League should prove acceptable. REFRESHMENTS are another serious problem. Broadly speaking, the child hostess ca nnot go wrong if she observes the following rules. Immediately on arrival, the g uest should be confronted with a tray of cocktails. During dinner; sherry, hock, and champagne. After dinner, liqueurs; and possibly, though this is not essenti al, high-balls when the party breaks up. Only the best brands of champagne may b e used. Better be seen on Fifth Avenue in the afternoon carrying a Teddy-bear th an try and palm off any of the American brands in the hope that, if the butler a nd footmen keep their hands over the labels, your guests will not know the diffe rence. On the all-important matter of amusing her guests after dinner, in the event of there being no theatre-party, the child hostess must be warned to spare no expen se. Only the best entertainers should be permitted to perform. If Uncle Frank wa nts to sing comic songs "to amuse the children," suppress him at once. In the ma

tter of comedy Harry Lauder and Fred Stone would be safe cards to play, but chil dren are such stern critics of humor that it would probably be better to steer c lear of it altogether and stick to such tried performers as Caruso, and Pavlova. ~~~ The End ~~~

THE COUNTRY SERVANT PROBLEM An Anguished Word or Two On the Matter of Securing and Retaining Rural Domestics By Pelham Grenville Vanity Fair (February 1015) HOW dwellers in the city can go about saying that they have a Servant Problem is more than I can understand. When I lived in town, I found life absolutely simpl e in that respect. I just went around to a good Agency, collected a Norwegian, p aid her five hundred dollars a month, or whatever it was, suited my hours to her s, had all the washing done at a laundry, and there I wason velvet, as you might say. How different it is in the country. Here in the wilds, the Servant Problem hits you like a dum dum shell from a German howitzer. It isnt only a question of keepi ng your maid. It is a question of having her appear at all. I shall not readily forget Miss OConnorJulia, to her intimates. She came to us like manna from the sky . She agreed, in the interview, to everything. She liked cooking, loved washing, and counted that day lost when she did not make beds or shake stoves. Moreover, she only demanded a salary of such modest proportions that it would have left u s ample for our little necessities and perhaps even for an occasional jaunt to t he city. She left our preliminary interview promising to appear again at eight oc lock on Monday morning.

MONTHS have passed since that day, but we have never again set eyes upon the sun shine of Miss OConnors smiles. She sent no word: she wrote no letter: she simply d idnt come, Weeks later we heard by the merest chance that her mother did not want her to go out that season. In these parts it is the mothers who are at the heart of the Servant Problem. Th ey have a habit of doing the family washing on Monday mornings, and the daughter s all want to help their maternal parents at their cleansing tasks. Celia, our p resent maid, lives at home with her mother, and visits us only by day. She is a jewel of the first water. She cooks like a chef and shakes a stove like a Sandow , but it would be a rash man who would bet on the off chance of her arriving her e on Monday morning. It is the old, old story. The fatal fascination of the maternal wash-tub is a li ttle too great for her. I sometimes have a vision of Celia on a Monday morning. I see her just mounting her bicycle, all ready to come to us! Another moment, and she will be on her way , and all will be joy, jollity, and song. And then through the window floats the strange, seductive scent of wet linen. She sniffs, hesitates, and, hesitating, is lost. The bicycle is wheeled back, and she flies like a homing pigeon to mess about with soap and things, while we, listening for her lightsome step upon the stairs, gradually pass from hope to despair.

OF course, we have our great moments. There is probably no purer joy than that w hich comes from hearing Celias tap on the door just when we have given up hope an d resigned ourselves to a maidless day. Once she turned up at ten oclock, and it was perfectly amazing to see the way the sun came out and the birds began sudden ly to sing; as if somebody had pressed a celestial button. Celia is older than most of the maids out here. They all seem to believe in star ting their professional careers early. They combine them with school. I remember how madly we rushed about the country last October in search of an Italian girl of whom we had heard. It transpired, on enquiry, that she was twelve years old. I once came home and found a tiny child toddling about the kitchen. After I had given her candy and hunted out a picture-book for her to look at and offered to play Bears or Red Indians with her, and wondered which of the neighbors little t ot she might be, I discovered that it was this child to whom I was about to pay six dollars a week for cooking my meals and cleaning my house.

THEY manage all these things better in British India. Sometimes, before Celia ca me to us, after I had shaken the stove and taken the cinders out into the garden and fed the animals and washed the dishes and mopped the kitchen-floor and swep t the living-rooms and made the beds and got in wood from the cellar (which, for the convenience of the occupant, is situated outside the house) and carried in a pail-full of coal and settled down for a quiet smoke and found that I had forg otten the coal for the kitchen-range and gone out again and got in the coal for the kitchen-range and settled down for a quiet smoke and found that I had omitte d to let the kitten in and gone out again and let the kitten in and settled down for a quiet smoke and found that through an oversight there was no kerosene in the oil-stove and gone out again and brought in kerosene and settled down for a quiet smoke, I would draw my chair closer to my wifes and say in a reverent sort of way, Tell me about India. And my wife would say, When I lived in India, we had a butler, an assistant-butle r, a cook, an assistant-cook, a sweeper, several grooms, a few gardeners, a dogboy, a ladys maid, and a chokrah! What, I would ask, though knowing quite well and merely wishing to luxuriate in th e description, is a chokrah? A chokrah, my wife would say, is an assistant-assistant-butlera man whose sole duty it is to help the assistant-butler assistant-buttle. And the salaries, the united salaries, of this entire mob? About twenty dollars a month, and they find their own food.

THAT if you please, is homelife in India. Why, in these United States the dog-boy would want about that amount a week for himself, and would undertake his arduous duties only on the understanding that h e was not expected to have anything to do with looking after the dogs. As for the assistant-assistant-butlerthe imagination simply declines to dwell upo n him at all.

~~~ The End ~~~

BOY! PAGE MR. COMSTOCK! Somebody Wants to See Him About Some Plays Now Running in New York By P. G. Wodehouse Vanity Fair (March 1915) ONE of the most puzzling of the phenomena of social life in New York is the curi ously erratic behavior of that guardian of the public morals, Mr. Anthony Comsto ck. He is like the pea in the shell-game. Now you see him, and now you don t. He also resembles one of those German bombs which sometimes make an explosion like the simultaneous excavation of a dozen subways, and sometimes fail to go off at all. He leaped upon September Morn in a manner reminiscent of young Mr. Hardwick of Harvard making a flying tackle; he set himself for the punch and swung on The Beautiful Adventure, like a White Hope, but, up to the moment of going to press, he has failed to emit so much as a soft moan of protest against The Song of Songs . Has he ceased to patronize the drama, or have his views on what is and what is not suitable for the New Yorker changed of late? Possibly the title of the above-named masterpiece has deceived him. That is the worst of play titles. Ninety in the Shade for instance, is nothing of the sort. The Song of Songs, from which we only just steered away our maternal grandmotherwho h ad bought tickets under the impression that it was a musical comedy, to which fo rm of entertainment she is passionately addictedought to have been called Why Girl s Go Wrong or Doras Downfall or something of that sort. Be that as it may. it is our considered opinion that Mr. Comstock has missed the chance of his young life. There is yet another possibility, to wit, that Mr. Comstock did see The Song of S ongs, but was so enchanted with Miss Irene Fenwicks acting of the principal rle tha t he failed, as we did, till we got away and thought it over quietly, to appreci ate the indecency of the play. What would happen to Mr. Sheldons dramatization of Herr Sudermanns novel, without Miss Fenwick to soften down the coarseness of the heroine, does not bear thinking of. Life with Lily Kardos, the shop-girl from the Boardwalk Bazaar at Atlantic City , was, reduced to its simplest terms, just one man after another, and differed f rom other lives of the same kind only in the fact that, as far as one could gath er, she did it at all from the highest motives. Her dear old father had left her a song about seeking him whom my soul loved, and we are supposed to accept Lilys various adventures as so many false starts in the search for an ideal. And such is Miss Fenwicks charm that we do so accept themtil l the curtain falls and we are out once more in the pure air of Forty-second Str eet. And then, in the sober, wholesome atmosphere of Broadway, we begin to doubt . Take away Miss Fenwick, whispers a voice, and is not The Song of Songs simply th e same old stuff which kindly managers have been producing for so many seasons, to give the Tired Business Man something to smack his lips over?

AND we are compelled to answer that it most certainly is. Hogarth said all there was to be said on the theme when he drew "The Harlot s Progress." You may gild

the life of the courtesan, and sentimentalize over it as you will, but it remain s a poor thing, and only artists of the highest class can save it from drearines s. Irene Fenwick is wonderful. She would have been enough by herself to have saved the piece. But the management wisely took no chances, and saw to it that each of the other principal parts should be in the best possible hands. Rather than The Song of Songs, The Cast of Casts would have made an excellent title; for better act ing than that of Dorothy Donnelly, John Mason, Cyril Keightley and Thomas Wise h as not been seen on Broadway for many seasons. Even the tiny rles of Ruby Purcell and Della Shay, the shop-girls, are perfectly played by Maude Allan and Helena Rapport. Our personal attitude towards The Song of Songs is very much that of the editor of the country paper towards the Jeffries-Johnson fight at Reno, who wrote that th e forthcoming contest was the most brutal, soul-destroying, degrading exhibition ever scheduled, but that he would certainly go. The Song of Songs is a thoroughly bad, immoral, and deleterious product, but we are going again next Tuesday. We trust, however. that Mr. Sheldons conscience will lead him to divide his authors r oyalty on our two dollars between Miss Fenwick and Miss Donnelly.

THERE seems to be something of a boom in s season. Miriam, in Outcast, walks on st approach to a heroine in Mr. Hobarts episode of The House of Last Resort; and male character is a woman who has fallen e frankly immoral Innocent in the play e in On Trial. It would seem as if the oman until Society had cast her off,

Women Who Did But Shouldnt Have Done thi to the stage from the street, and the neare morality-play, Experience, is Frailty in the in six other successes the principal fe some of the way, if not all of itfrom th of that name, to the injured but erring wif public did not begin to be attracted to a w

There is one other play in which, though women are falling, as it were, with dul l thuds all over the place, there is nothing into which Mr. Comstock, when disco vered and dragged from his hiding-place, could, so to speak, get his teeth. This is that curious Mormon drama Polygamy, by the authors ofof all piecesThe Dummy. Life in Utah is still, according to Miss Ford and Mr. OHiggins, the corollary of Lily Kardos just one woman after another. Miss Ford and Mr. OHiggins, unlike the gi fted author of the ballad entitled, OGorman the Mormon, who pointed out how hard th e practice of polygamy was on the male, take the view that it is the women who r eally suffer from it. They have drawn a picture of quiet, peaceful, home life in Salt Lake City, with everybody marrying everybody else, which should do much to discourage immigration to that district. The beauty of the Mormon play, from on e point of view, is that you can be corkingly improper and nobody can say a word , because you are exposing a GRAVE EVIL. That scene where the first wife falls s wooning outside the second wifes bedroom door gets considerably closer to the poi nt where the police rush in with locust- sticks, and announce that the theatre i s pinched, than anything in The Song of Songs, yet the authors, if charged, would unhesitatingly reply, Salacious? Where do you get that? What do you mean, salacio us? This is a Grave Exposure. And, presumably, they would have right on their sid e. But the Tired Business Man gets his thrill arid smacks his lips, just the sam e. As far as the success of Polygamy is concerned, it was unfortunate that The Girl Fr om Utah was such a hit earlier in the season, at the Knickerbocker. Mormons may b e everything that is sinister and awful, but, to the average man, they are inext ricably bound up with Mr. Joseph Cawthorn, and Polygamy gives one a sense of somet hing missing, which can only be removed by the writing in of a couple of good co mic songs for the Prophet. This done, and a dancing chorus added to Act II, ther

e is no reason why Polygamy should not run into 1916.

THAT same advantage which we have just noted in the Mormon drama belongs also to the Modern Morality play. So long as you call your characters Youth,Frailty, and so on, you, as the playwright, may go the limit, and the policeman on the sidewalk , outside the theatre, will touch his hat to you. However improper you are, you mean well and are simply working for moral good. All things considered, Mr. Hoba rt has been rather niggardly to the Tired Business Man, who would probably have liked to see a good deal more of the lady called Passion than the one brief scen e in which she figures. As for Mr. Hobarts Pleasure, she might have been called R espectability. There is a certain amount of good knock-about vice in the House o f Last Resort, but nothing to bring a blush to the baldest head, and, all in all , Mr. Hobart may be said to have rather slipped one over on the t. b. m. But, if Mr. Hobart has failed him, M. Brieux has not. In Maternity he achieves the limit, and then not a little. But here again Mr. Comstock will find himself han dicapped. You cannot shriek the charge of immorality at Brieux unless you are pr epared to deal singly and seriatim with every highbrow in the land, for Brieux i s Serious and Educational, and only crashes through thin ice because he feels th at thin ice ought to be crashed through for the good of the nation. Looking at it dispassionately, indeed, one comes to the conclusion that Mr. Coms tock is a wise man to lie hid, and make no outcry against the present crop of pl ays. They are extremely blushful, but how is he to say so? If he attacks Maternit y, Brieux raises his eyebrows, and says, Has this man no desire to improve social conditions? If he turns on Polygamy, Mr. OHiggins looks pityingly at Miss Ford, as w ho should exclaim: This poor person is apparently unaware that we are Opening The Eyes Of America to an Awful State Of Things. If he objects to certain incidents in Experience, Mr. Hobart silently directs his attention to the abstract names of his characters. The only play he can really assault without putting himself in a false position is The Song of Songs, and Miss Fenwick is so charming that he woul d hardly have the heart to do that. BUT the fact remains that he ought to do something, and that soon. Did you hear what Mr. Billy Sunday has been saying about us? Here are his exact words: Theres r otten, stinking, corroding, corrupt, hell-ridden, God-defying, devil-ridden New York. God will get it in his own good time. It must have been the theatres which gave Mr. Sunday that idea, for wheat there is corroding and devil-ridden in the ordinary life of the city cannot be discovered. New York is a most respectable p lace, full of nice old gentlemen dancing the maxixe in restaurants, and crowds o f lovely girls flocking to see the Perils of Pauline at the moving-picture houses, and fair women and brave men drinking ice-cream sodas in drug-stores and innoce nt-hearted-commuters sprinting to make the five-fifteen for Kew Gardens. There i s not a bit of harm In New York, but the place is getting a bad name simply beca use these powerful dramatists try to make out that all men are villains and all women are either villainesses, or Women Who Have Been Wronged. Mr. Comstock must act, and at once. There is still time. In this mornings papers there was a headline: BILLY SUNDAY CANNOT SAVE NEW YORK TILL THE FALL That gives us a few months more in which to put our house in order, but every mo ment is precious. We must rout out Mr. Comstock at once. Boy, page Mr. Comstock.

~~~ The End ~~~

SCOOTERIN: HALF SAILING, HALF ICE-BOATING By P. G. Wodehouse Vanity Fair (March 1915) LIKE so many other pastimes, Scooterin did not start its career with the idea of being a pastime at all. Its original idea was a purely utilitarian one. This fre quently happens in the world of sport. Tue first men to Scooter did it, not because they wanted to be exhilarated by th e movement, but because they wanted to get from one place to another. They were the various groups of life-savers on the beach which bounds the ocean side of th e Great South Bay, and they found it impossible to get over to the mainland in w inter for supplies owing to the danger from the ice-holes in the bay. With a tou ch of natural genius, they put a pair of runners on the bottom of their boats. T he boats whizzed across the ice, plunged into a hole, and, instead of being at a ll discommoded by the hole, behaved better in the water than on the ice. And therein lies the charm of Scooterin, that it is at its best when the ice has holes in it, for the pleasurable sensation comes from the abrupt change from ice to water and from water to icea sensation somewhat resembling that obtained by sh ooting the chutes at Coney Island. It is this that makes your Scooterer laugh a s harp, derisive laugh, when you say to him that you suppose that Scooterin is reall y just the same as ice-boating, isnt it? In an eloquent burst he will point out th at Scooterin has it over ice-boating in a dozen ways, which he will proceed speci fically to name. For one thing its cheaperas a good Scooter boat costs only $100. You have to steer a Scooter entirely by the jib. It takes two or three persons to work it properl y, and some thing of a Polar bear or an Arctic explorer to enjoy it on a really cold day.

When the hardy Scooter rises from his couch on a February morning and finds the water frozen in his bedroom pitcher, and, putting his head out of doors, is near ly decapitated by a razor-like wind blowing from the east, he says to himself, Its a hanged fine day. Ill go Scooterin. So he trots off to the partly frozen lake or bay, collects a few friends, and gets out his boat. And presently they are flyin g across the ice at the pace of a racing automobile. Soon they come to a spot wh ere the ice has melted and left a watery gap. The Scooter boat does not even hes itate. It skims across the gap like a duck, and goes about its lawful occupation s on the other side as if nothing had happened. And then the wind drops suddenly , or shifts, and the boat goes round in circles, while he at the tiller shouts u nintelligible directions to one of his passengers to shift his weight to one sid e, or not to shift his weight to one side, or to do something which he is not do ing, or not to do something which he is doing. And the passenger, by now a chunk of solid ice, tries to thaw his frozen senses sufficiently to do what he is tol d to do or not to do what he is told not to do. And somewhere, deep down in him, a voice is whispering, About now, you poor deluded nut, if you hadnt come Scooter

in, you would be sitting down to a nice, hot breakfast in front of your fire. I hold no brief for or against Scooterin. If the public likes to rush to lakes an d rivers and bays and start Scooterin, by all means let it so rush and Scooter: b ut let it be clearly understood that I, though advertising this weird pastime in this esteemed paper, will not often be dragged from my warm fireside to partici pate in it.

~~~ The End ~~~

All About the Pastime of Divorce By Pelham Granville Vanity Fair, May 1915 DIVORCE, which is derived from the Latin word divertere, to go apart, and may be either an occasional experiment, as in the case of the ordinary citizen, or a h obby, as with Mr. Nat Goodwin, Mr. Robert Fitzsimmons, and Mr. De Wolf Hopper, i s best described as the privilege accorded to the losing player (in the game of matrimony) to buy another stack of chips and start in all over again. It is an i ngenious invention by which the resolute man may enjoy all the advantages of bei ng a Mormon elder, without having plays written about him by Harriet Ford and Ha rvey OHiggins. The word divorce is in many ways the most popular in the language, and it is by virtue of constantly repeating it to himself, like a magic charm, that the fastidious man is enabled to bear up, when first confronted by his wifes relations. Divorce, in its earliest stages, was a crude thing. Prehistoric Man conducted hi s divorces, as he did his marriages, with the fat end of a stone bludgeon. The o nly way in which the divorce ceremony differed from the marriage ceremony was th at in the former case the plaintiff hit harder. The idea of the remarriage of a divorce was repugnant to him, and he endeavored t o render such a thing out of the question.

IT was under the Ancient Romans that Divorce, considered as a fine art, reached its highest point. The astute husbands and wives of that epoch saw their way to doing themselves a bit of good by means of it. There is no doubt that the Romans gave divorce-presents, probably in the shape of fish-slices, egg-holders, plate -warmers and all those things which, when taken round the corner to the local pa wnbroker (avunculus), could be exchanged for solid and satisfactory cash (denari i). The Ancient Roman, therefore, got his unfortunate friends as it were, coming and going, and may be said to have known a bit. In modern times Divorce varies greatly according to the country in which it take s place. In England for instance, it is so rare that, when it happens, the newsp apers devote most of their middle page to a report of the proceedings. But as a matter of fact, divorce in England is mostly confined to the theatre. If the fir st act of an English play is laid either in the morning-room of Maltravers Park or in the drawing-room of Lady Beevors town-house in Grosvenor Square, you can he pretty sure that somebodys divorce is going to be the motive of it.

It is assumed in England, at any rate that the United States leads the world in the matter of divorce: and it will probably be a severe blow to our patriots to learn that this is not the case. Even at the risk of inflaming Messrs. Goodwin, Fitzsimmons, and Hopper to renewed efforts, we must state the truth that Japan m akes America look like a timid novice in this particular branch of industry. In Japan there are twenty-two divorces per thousand inhabitants, while in the Unite d States there are a mere eight per thousand. It is but a melancholy consolation that the next competitor in order, Switzerland, only scores three. This is the sort of revelation which takes all the heart out of an energetic and persevering people. The reason is not far to seek. It lies in the fact that, wh ile certain States are doing all that can be expected of them we take off our ha t to Washington, where there are eleven separate and distinct grounds for divorc e others are simply loafing. In South Carolina, for instance, divorce is actuall y not permitted, and in many states it cannot he obtained for such perfectly ade quate causes as teasing the Siberian eel-spaniel, omitting to bring home candy, putting ice in the claret, wearing a straw-hat before June the fifteenth, readin g the novels of Harold Bell Wright, using a last seasons automobile, revoking at Bridge, and appearing in public in tortoise-shell-rimmed spectacles. Naturally t he Japanese, a race which pulls together as one man in every patriotic movement, is way ahead of the United States.

BUT, even under existing conditions, with every obstacle placed in the way of di vorce, it is astonishing that it is not more common. When we look about us and s ee how uniformly repulsive our fellow human-beings are, it seems extraordinary t hat only eight out of every thousand of them take the sensible course of breakin g away from one another forever. The reason is that, in this country, the expens e of divorce is so great. The male aspirant is faced with the prospect of having to part not only from his wife, which he could endure cheerfully, but from a co nsiderable portion of his hard-earned doubloons in the shape of alimony. Judges, as a class, display, in the matter of arranging alimony, that reckless generosi ty which is only found in men who are giving away somebody elses money. It is get ting so that divorce, instead of being the pastime of the people, has degenerate d into a relaxation for the idle rich. Alimony in Japan is a mere matter of yen a yen being about a thousandth part of a dollar. With a reasonable amount of luck, your Japanese can get divorced half a dozen times a year for about what it would cost him in New York to tip the hea d-waiter of a second-rate cabaret for getting him a table twenty-seven feet from the dancing-floor and directly behind a pillar.

~~~ The End ~~~

Aubreys Arrested Individuality by P. Brooke Haven Vanity Fair, May 1915 ** Editors Note : P. Brooke Haven is one of the many pseudonyms PGW used WHAT soured existence for Aubrey Devine was the fact that his wife was, in one i mportant matter, unreasonable. She declined to go before the world as the bearer of his name. Her argument was two-fold. In the first place she claimed that, as Adelaide Brewster Moggs, she was already carrying a sufficient weight of name f

or one weak woman and that, in a world which contained Virginia Terhune van der Water, Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews, and Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale, there w as not sufficient space for Adelaide Brewster Moggs Devine. In the second place, Adelaide Brewster Moggs was not so much a name as a trade-mark. The public had grown accustomed to welcoming the utterances on The Future of Woman by Adelaide Brewster Moggs, and to spring an unexpected Devine on them would perplex and ann oy them. It would be as if they were suddenly confronted at their favorite vaude ville house with Eva Tanguay Robinson or Irene Franklin Chesterfield-Bodsworth. Aubrey yielded the point, and with it his individuality. It is true that one or two intimate friends down-town knew him as Devine, but to the world at large he was I-forget-his-name, Adelaide Brewster Moggs husband. Earnest sociologists who tr ipped over Aubrey in dark corners of the Devine apartment on the occasion of Ade laide Brewster Moggs weekly salons, in relating the episode to their wives, would not say that they had stubbed their toe on Aubrey Rockmetteller Devine, they wo uld say that they fell foul of Miss Moggs husband. Newspaper reports of meetings graced by the presence of Americas leading exponent of Womans Rights would record a speech from Miss Adelaide Brewster Moggs, who was accompanied by her husband. So metimes a snapshot of Adelaide would appear in a Sunday paper, with Aubrey at he r side. The legend beneath it would run Miss Adelaide Brewster Moggs, the famous champion of Womanhood, with her husband. This preyed upon Aubreys mind. It gave him a feeling of disembodied spirituality which was most unpleasant. Sometimes he had to pinch himself to make sure that h e was there. When signing a check he would often pause an instant to remember wh at name he ought to write. He began to brood. Lying awake at night, he would try to think up ways of making a name for himself. He went at it systematically. He made a list of the most pr ominent men in the country, men who had made names for themselves, as follows: President Wilson, William J. Bryan, Jack Johnson, Vernon Castle, Billy Sunday, G eorge M. Cohan, John D. Rockefeller. Could he follow in these mens footsteps? No, and, briefly, for the following reas ons: He did not know how to wait watchfully. He disliked grape-juice. He could not bo x. He tripped over his feet when he tried to foxtrot. He did not perspire readil y. He had no father. He had a good digestion.

SOMETIMES he thought of committing a murder or robbing a bank, but refrained bec ause the sight of blood always made him feel faint and there seemed, for a novic e, to be so few opportunities of robbing banks. But one morning Fate relented. Genevieve OGrady entered his life. One really scarcely knows what to say of Miss OGrady. She was employed by the Mam moth Store, and, except on very rare occasions, hardly ever had to work more tha n eleven hours a day. And she was in receipt of the excellent salary of five and half dollars a week, ample for a young girl who does not keep an automobile and has mastered the art of living on bread and weak tea. Looking at it with the ey e of a dispassionate observer, one would have said that life was one long round of enjoyment for the girl. She had the whole day to herself except from eight in the morning till seven at night, and nothing to do with her money, after feedin g and clothing herself, except squander it on her personal pleasures. Yet this child of fortune, in a silly mood, flung herself off the side of a ferr

y-boat into the whirling waters of the Hudson River. Of the dozen or so spectato rs of the incident, all had some remark to make about it. One said, What did she do that for? Another said, Would you look at that! Others declared that somebody ou ght to do something about it. The only person present to take definite action was Aubrey Rockmetteller Devine. To Aubrey this chance seemed sent by Heaven. Pausing merely to remove his hat he plunged in and swam to where Miss OGrady, now repenting of her rash act, kicked and called for help. The only doubt in his mind was the exact way in which the p apers would feature the thing. They might say: DEVINES DASHING DEED DARINGLY DRAGS DAMSEL FROM DIRE DESTRUCTION Or possibly, DEVINE DID IT Saw, Seized, Saved Suicidal Shop-Girl Or again, DARE-DEVIL DEVINE DIVERTS DEATH BY DROWNING As he reached her, Miss OGrady came up for the third time and twined herself clin gingly about him. They returned below the surface together. Just about the time when the only really suitable headline for the incident woul d have been DEVINE SWALLOWS ALL OF THE HUDSON RIVER help arrived. After they had done all that first-aid-for-the-apparently-drowned stuff on Aubre y, they took him and the dripping lady to Park Row. There the reporters all had a good look at him.

Why, I know that man, one of the news editors finally exclaimed. Its its Ive forg his name, but hes Adelaide Brewster Moggs husband.

~~~ The End ~~~

The Disappearance Of Podmarsh

Good News For After-Dinner Speakers By P. G. Wodehouse Vanity Fair (June 1915) STUYVESANT Bodger, the explorer, is back from West Africa with a strange story, several strange stories, in fact, but one which differs from the others in that we cannot be absolutely certain that it is a lie. He claims to have seen and spo ken to Robert Podmarsh. Only the oldest members now remember Podmarsh, once the scourge of the club. It is so many years since he disappeared. He vanished one summer without warning, a nd I can still recall the period of anxiety we lived through. We were afraid he might be in our midst again at any moment, telling us those old familiar humorou s stories of his under which we had suffered so long. Then, as the days went by and he still remained absent, a new hope began to animate our breasts. And final ly we came to the conclusion that he must be dead. Those were happy days. But Bodger says that Podmarsh is not dead. I will tell you the whole thing, said Bodger. I was travelling through the Oojoobwa region, south of the MPongo, when, as night was falling, I came to a small villa ge, a mere collection of mud huts. The inhabitants looked friendly, so I determi ned to stop for the night. There seemed to be a good deal of excitement in the p lace. There was a crowd of semi-naked persons of both sexes chattering and gesti culating. I enquired the reason, and learned that it was the night of the compli mentary dinner to Ggbrllmx, which in the MPongo dialect, means He Who Entertains. A fowl was to be roasted whole in the market-place, and human sacrifices and all sorts of jollifications, and afterwards He Who Entertains would make one of his famous speeches and tell some of his inimitable dialect stories. Well, to cut a long story short, which Podmarsh would never have done, I attende d the dinner, and the first thing that struck me (not counting a cocoanut thrown by one of the guests) was the extraordinary likeness of the principal guest to someone I had seen before. That speech of his took me straight back to this club. It was Robert Podmarsh. T he speech contained no fewer than six of those Irish dialect stories which he us ed to inflict on us. He spoke, of course, in the MPongo dialect, but the stories were the same. It seems that he began to suspect from almost imperceptible signs that his anecd otes had outstayed their first strong welcome in this club. He decided to travel, to give us time to miss him. And, while off the coast of W est Africa, his vessel was wrecked. Coming ashore, he was met and captured by ro ving natives, and conducted to that village.

THE first and only ballot taken among the inhabitants on the question of what to do with him resulted in a sweeping victory for the party the main plank in whos e platform was that Podmarsh should be cooked and eaten. The preparations were well under way, when a fowl, which had been nesting in som e bushes, ran past. Habit, even in that crisis, was too much for Podmarsh. Why, he asked, did that chicken cross the road? The tribe gave the matter its attent

ion. Opinions varied. Some said that it crossed the road to avoid a snake. Other s hinted at witchcraft. Not at all, said Podmarsh. It crosses the road to get to th e other side. The effect, he tells me, was instantaneous. There was a riot. Dignified medicine -men held their sides: portly witch-doctors rolled in the dust. And before they could recover, Podmarsh was telling them other stories of the same vintage.

AFTER that there was no more talk of eating Podmarsh. The tribe took him to its heart. A special hut and seven wives were assigned to him. Podmarsh was in his element. The MPongo are a simple, untutored race, and such is their mental darkness that they did not even know, till Podmarsh informed them, that a door could ever be anything but a door. The whole affair, concluded Stuyvesant Bodger, is a remarkable example of the law o f supply and demand. And I could not help thinking, as I left the village, where there was already talk of running Podmarsh for the office of local God, in plac e of a stone idol which had let the MPongo down badly in its last two wars with n eighboring tribes, what a pity it is that all our club jesters and after-dinner speakers cannot be induced to follow his example and go to some distant spot whe re they would be really appreciated. Failing that, he added sadly, the next best thing would be to adopt in New York the admirable MPongo custom of human sacrifices.

~~~ The End ~~~

THE SECRET PLEASURES OF REGINALD by P. Brooke-Haven Vanity Fair - (June 1915) I FOUND Reggie in the club one Saturday afternoon. He was reclining in a long ch air, motionless, his eyes fixed glassily on the ceiling. He frowned a little, wh en I spoke. You dont seem to be doing anything, I said. Its not what Im doing, its what I am not doing that matters. It sounded like an epigram, but epigrams are so little associated with Reggie th at I ventured to ask what he meant. He sighed. Ah well, he said. I suppose the sooner I tell you, the sooner youll go. D o you know Bodfish? I shuddered. Wilkinson Bodfish? I do. Have you ever spent a week-end at Bodfishs place in the country? I shuddered again. I have.

Well, Im not spending the week-end at Bodfishs place in the country. I see you are not. But You dont understand. I do not mean that I am simply absent from Bodfishs place in t he country. I mean that I am deliberately not spending the week-end there. When you interrupted me just now, I was not strolling down to Bodfishs garage, listeni ng to his prattle about his new car. I glanced round uneasily. Reggie, old man, youre youre not This hot weather I am perfectly well, and in possession of all my faculties. Now tell me! Can you imagine anything more awful than to spend a week-end with Bodfish? On the spur of the moment I could not. Can you imagine anything more delightful, then, than not Bodfish? Well, thats what Im doing now. Soon, when you other engagements, please dont let me keep you I shall not listen to Mrs. Bodfish on the subject of young Willie lligence. spending a week-end with have gone if you have any not go into the house and Bodfishs premature inte

I GOT his true meaning. I see. You mean that you will be thanking your stars that you arent with Bodfish. That is it, put crudely. But I go further. I dont indulge in a mere momentary self -congratulation, I do the thing thoroughly. If I were week-ending at Bodfishs, I should have arrived there just half an hour ago. I therefore selected that momen t for beginning not to week-end with Bodfish. I settled myself in this chair and I did not have my back slapped at the station. A few minutes later I was not wh irling along the country roads, trying to balance the car with my legs and an el bow. Time passed, and I was not shaking hands with Mrs. Bodfish. I have just had the most corking half hour, and shortly when you have remembered an appointment I shall go on having it. What I am really looking forward to is the happy time after dinner. I shall pass it in not playing bridge with Bodfish, Mrs. Bodfish, and a neighbor. Sunday morning is the best part of the whole week-end, though. T hat is when I shall enjoy myself. Do you know a man named Pringle? Next Saturday I am not going to stay with Pringle. I forget who is not to be my host the Satu rday after that I have so many engagements of this kind that I lose track of the m.

BUT, Reggie, this is genius. You have hit on the greatest idea of the age. You mi ght extend this system of yours. I do. Some of the jolliest evenings I have spent have been not at the theatre. I have often wondered what it was that made you look so fit and happy. Yes. These little non-visits of mine pick me up and put life into me for the comi ng week. I get up on Monday morning feeling like a lion. The reason I selected B odfish this week, though I was practically engaged to a man named Stevenson who lives out in Connecticut, was that I felt run-down and needed a real test. I sha ll be all right on Monday.

And so shall I, I said, sinking into the chair beside him. Youre not going to the country? he asked regretfully. I am not. I, too, need a tonic. I shall join you at Bodfishs. I really feel a lot better already. I closed my eyes, and relaxed, and a great peace settled upon me.

~~~ The End ~~~

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO HAMLET The Bacon-Shakespeare Controversy Settled at Last By Pelham Grenville Vanity Fair (June 1915) THE Baconians say that Shakespeare could not have written the Shakespeare plays because he had not the education. Mr. Arnold Daly in a recent number of Vanity Fair said that Bacon could not have written them because he had not the stagecraft. It is just as well to get this controversy settled and remove a powerful temptat ion from the paths of young authors, so here is my theory, which not only gives a satisfactory answer to every difficulty but bears also to anyone with any know ledge of the mechanism of the theatre: that is to say, a knowledge of what happe ns before a play is produced on the stage the obvious stamp of truth. Bacon, it will be remembered by historical students, was a man of considerable g ifts, best known to the reading public of his day as the author of two bright li ttle works entitled respectively The Novum Organum and De Interpretatione Naturae et c., etc. Like everybody else since Adam, he had the firm conviction that he could write a corking play. There never has been anyone who did not think that he could write a play and the re never will be anyone.

SO Bacon, in the intervals of Chancellor-of-the-Exchequering, sat down, got out the old quill pen, and dashed off a tragedy. Titles were not his forte, so, inst ead of calling it The Girl from Elsinore," the best he could do was Hamlet." A hanged good bit of work, by my halidom, he said to Lady Bacon. This will be a hit . And he began sending it round to the managers. The first manager kept it six months, and, when Bacon wrote enquiring about it, sent him back a farcical comedy by some other gentleman, regretting that it was not in his power, much as he admired it, to produce the same. Bacon sighed, and sent another copy to another manager. When a year had elapsed, he wrote, apologizing for seeming in any way to be tryi

ng to rush the manager, but asking if any decision on his drama Hamlet had been ar rived at. A few days later he received by the same mail his manuscript and a let ter from the managers secretary saying there was evidently some mistake, for no s uch manuscript had ever been received in the office.

BY this time Bacon had begun to realize, as so many others have realized since, that things theatrical are inseparable from a sort of brisk delirium usually ass ociated only with the interiors of homes for the insane. He had just resolved to give the thing up, when, quite unexpectedly, a manager w rote asking him to call. After waiting three and a half hours in the ante-room, with a crowd of blue-chin ned persons who told each other how At John-o-Groats a year agone come the feast o f St. Paul, I jumped right in and saved ye show and By St. George of England I was a riot at Bootle," he was shown in to the managers private office.

Now this whats-its-name, this Hamlet of yours, said the manager. It looks pretty good to me, by St. James of Compostella. I kind of like it. Its got the punch. Bacon murmured his gratification. Of course, added the manager, itll have to be fixed. Fixed? Sure. Couldnt put it on as it stands. The public wouldnt look at it. Youre new at th is game, I suppose!

BACON muttered something about having done a bit of writing. Oh, shucks, said the manager, I know all about that. I know a fellow whose cousin r ead a piece by you, the Novum something. But writing plays is quite different. N o essayist ever wrote a good play. Its a rule in the theatre that the better the stuff a man writes in any other line, the worse he is at writing plays. No, well get this thing of yours fixed. I know a lad wholl do it. Shakespeares his name. Hes in my company. Hell put some ginger in it. Now about terms. You get one per cent of the gross. Bacon, who as Chancellor of the Exchequer was pretty good at figures, protested that one per cent of the gross was not much. Forget it, said the manager. Why, you might make a pile out of one per cent. Columb us discovered America so youll have the American money as well, and so on. Sign h ere. A shrewd man, Bacon realised at once that there was nothing else for him to do.

THE superstition current in theatrical circles that there was a kind of magic in playwriting, and that nobody could fathom the mysteries of the craft unless he was one of the small coterie who spent their time in the Mermaid Tavern buying s ack for managers, was too strong for him. He knew his Hamlet was good, but he also knew that he would never get it produced

unless he consented to hand it over to the men who had been twenty years in the b usiness, and knew it all, to do what they liked with it. So he signed the contrac t, and the manager sent round to the Mermaid for Shakespeare. Shakespeare read the manuscript, then and there. The finish is weak, he said. No pep. What you want to do is to have the whole bunch jump on each other and everybody kill everybody else. Ill fix it. But surely, said Bacon, isnt that all a little improbable?

It doesnt matter whether its improbable, said Shakespeare, coldly. Its what the publi wants. Its good stuff. Now, you make Hamlet loony. That wont do. Do you think mat ine girls are going to worship a nut? But its in the character. His sufferings drove him mad.

BACK to the egg, youre not hatched yet. Check his sufferings with your hat. What h es going to do is to pretend hes crazy, see? Everybodys fooled but the audience. Gi ves a chance for comedy, too. Make the girl loony, if you like. Ill write in a sc ene where he joshes those two college friends of his. Now what about this To be o r not to be speech? The public dont like soliloquies. I guess Ill cut that. No, I g uess itll have to stand. It gives the stage-hands a chance to set the scene back of the front-cloth. But if its to stay in, it wants to be longer. Ill write in a l ine or two. Hows this for a line: Or to take arms against a sea of troubles? BUT you cant take arms against a sea. Its a mixed metaphor. Never mind, its a good acting line. In it goes. Well, there we are for a start. Ill take the script off to the Mermaid and be thinking up some other improvements. Bacon went home and tied a vinegar-soaked kerchief round his forehead. He did not attend the opening of Hamlet or any subsequent performance. That, I think, is undoubtedly the solution of the controversy which has caused s o much good ink to be spilled and so many homes to be broken up. We know what theatrical managers are to-day, and we know what they were like in old Greece, for it is on record that even Aristophanes only succeeded in getting his first play produced by allowing a since forgotten, but then established, dr amatist to put his name to it. Is it likely that conditions were any different in the days of Elizabeth? We tro w not, by our halidom, and by other of our personal possessions.

NOTHING is more likely than that Bacon should write a play, and nothing is less likely than that the managers of his day should permit it to see the footlights unfixed by the twenty-years-in-the-business brigade. One does not wish to think hardly of Shakespeare, so we may assume that he did o ffer to have the bills read as follows: HAMLET by WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

and Francis Bacon but Bacon, after attending one or two rehearsals, absolutely refused to have his name connected in any way with the production. It has always been a mystery to critics why the author of these plays, capable a s he was of the most exalted writing, should have inserted lines and scenes in t hem so far below his best standard.

OBVIOUSLY they were the good acting lines and the corking bits which Shakespeare a dded in the process of fixing. One of these days a body of scholars will unearth a cryptogram or something cont aining Bacons frank opinion of theatrical circles. If they do, it will probably be indelibly written on asbestos paper.

~~~ The End ~~~

SOME THOUGHTS ON MR. OPPENHEIM By P. G. Wodehouse Vanity Fair (July 1915) ONE of the worst features of the Great War would seem to be that, as far as the best and most thrilling side of his work is concerned, it must of necessity put Mr. E. Philipps Oppenheim out of business. He may, and no doubt will, continue t o write excellent sensational stories, but we fear that what might be called the International Spy element in his fiction is doomed. You know how the Oppenheim novel starts out. As he sups at Londons most expensive and exclusive restaurant, the notice of the hero is attracted by a beautiful gi rl in company with a distinguished and red-ribbony sort of man. Enquiry elicits the fact that this is the French Ambassador. Why is he in London? Nobody knows. To those in close touch with international po litics his presence there is sinister. The hero returns to his hotel, thinking d eeply, and stubs his toe on something soft and squdgy under the bed. It is the b ody of the French Ambassador. Pinned to the corpse is a card, on which, in a dis guised hand, are written the words At-a-boy! Keep-a-working! At this moment there is a tap at the window, the beautiful girl enters from the fire-escape, hands th e hero a sealed envelope marked Important papers. Keep dry, and retires. The rest of the story deals with the various attempts of mysterious plug-uglies to give t he hero his. In the end it turns out that the envelope contains material which, if disclosed, would inevitably plunge Europe into a general conflict.

But now all the European powers have suddenly come out into the open. They have ceased to plot and begun to fight. Platoons of beautiful girls could inundate an Oppenheim hero with letters and he would light his pipe with them.

It is a great pity, for, if there was one safe refuge from weariness and depress ion to which we could fly at will, it was these behind-the-scenes novels of Mr. Oppenheim. There has never been anyone quite like him. He raised the sensational novel to a niche higher than it had ever dreamed of reaching. His easy, disting uished style, the naturalness of his dialogue, and the wonderfully expert story construction in them made his novels unique.

OF course, he will continue to supply us with perfectly good murders, but his as sassins will be mere amateurs, working to gain some private end, not polished sc hemers in the pay of a great power, with all that powers complicated system of es pionage behind them. No, it will not be the same. We shall miss the teamwork. In The Great Secret spies took the whole floor of the hotel where the hero lived in order to be able to go about their job of eliminating him with that leisure so e ssential to Oppenheim assassins. That is good. That has the spacious touch. And now this War comes along and spoils it all. We shall always be glad to welcome Mr. Oppenhems well-bred corpses, but, somehow, they will never be quite the same.

~~~ The End ~~~