She is quite content to compensate for her absence of literary polish by her gusto for life, her retentive memory, and that admirable lack of restraint which is the dominant characteristic of the literature of our time. Nevertheless, you cannot be shrewd, observant, vivacious, intuitive, for nothing, and her pages are freely sprinkled with epigrams which would have done credit to a Wilde, and maxims which need not have been disowned by)a_ Rochefoucauld. Here are some df them A woman who has toppled off the pedestal upon which her husband has placed her might just as well set, about earning a divorce, If you want to be really popular with men become a widow.
Black always sets off golden hair; so I have always mourned my husbands for the full period.
I love beautiful things, because they are beautiful. Keats is my favourite; he understood what Beauty meant.
To the layman, picking up this book for the first time, the contents will coma as a revelation of beauty and craftsmanship. The letterpress is full of valuable information, and the illustrations include many wonderful colour plates; one of these, the picture of an antique Ghiordes prayer rug took over two months' experimenting before it was possible to make the plate, and more than 60 shades of red appear in it. The result is a triumph of colour reproduction. For intending purchasers of Oriental rugs there 1s a fund of practical information and advice in this book, and dealers and connoisseurs will find it extremely handy for reference. "Those who have good Oriental rugs will do well to keep them," says the author in his preface to this fifth edition, "and those who ever hope to possess any had better get them now... for they will surely grow more scarce and higher in price. Most of the fug-making people have been annihilated or transported, and those left have eaten their sheep and made their wool into clothing. The family looms of the East are silent and broken, and there will be little or no weaving in the future, Tt is one of the pitiful results of the war, for truly there is a wealth of beauty and a world of sentiment in these magic carpets of the Orient." One is not surprised that this is the fifth edition of the book—it should run into many more editions yet.
To flirt properly one must be feeling fit.
Never pay a doctor's bill immediately. 1f you do he will think that he underestimated your value.
God is a great basis for friendship.
If a man knows that you have been a good wife to two husbands, and loved them, naturally he feels fairly certain that you will love Aim and make him a good wife. Practice always does make perfect.
Can these as a body be surpassed by a similar number of quotations from any recent book?
Who the authoress is I don't know. It ought not to be difficult to discover. Anybody who knows a lady who was married first to an Indian soldier, then to a Harley Street specialist, and finally to a Somersetshire baronet who died during the war, and who had a family by each husband, will be very likely on the right track. There cannot be many women who fill the bill. The last husband's name is given as "Sir George L—," but possibly that is camouflage, meant to put one on a false scent. Perhaps the encidents have also been a little distorted to aid in the preservation of anonymity.. Still, with such an example of candid confession before me, I may chance one guess as to the name of this latest and not least lively of our modern memories. Can it be E. V. Lucas?
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.