devil in the
field. And it is almost as futile to picture his prodigious
self-conceit, his vile taste in dress and furniture, his conjugal
infidelity, his habit of treating his women-folk as menials, since these
vices are human and venial in comparison with what the War has revealed.
Anyone might easily hazard the conjecture that the murderers of Belgium
had never entertained too fastidious a respect for womanhood; and after
the destruction of Louvain and Ypres it is mere bathos to insist that
the perpetrators of these outrages against art had previously cherished
a Philistine affection for antimacassars and plush sofas.

A common difficulty with me when I witness stage tragedies arising out
of a marriage of uncongenial types is to understand how the couple ever
came together. And so here, when the English girl, _Margaret Tinworth_,
in face of poverty and parental disapproval, marries a Prussian officer
in a small garrison town, and then finds all sorts of unbearable
conditions in her surroundings, one asks oneself, and fails to discover,
what kind of glamour he had cast over her that most of these conditions,
already patent enough in the society in which she had moved, had
contrived either to escape her notice or to appear tolerable. True, she
had gone to Germany to find release from the solitude of a motherless
home, where an unsympathetic father had no attention to spare from his
art treasures; but, with so admirable an aunt as _Lady Lushington_ to
chaperon her in her own country, it was not easy to see why she must
needs resort to exotic consolation.

[Illustration:
GERMAN FRIGHTFULNESS REPULSED.

_Lieutenant Kurt Hartling_ ... Mr. Malcolm Cherry
_Margaret Tinworth_ ... Miss Rosalie Toller.]

However, I do not propose to set my judgment up against that of the
authors, male and female, in regard to the credibility of her taste in
men, since, after all, the heart of a woman is a thing past finding out.
But I do venture to dispute the reasonableness of her ultimate attitude
in conditions where this enigmatic organ was not directly concerned. For
you are to understand that in the Third Act the brutality of her husband
and the insults hurled at England, which she was expected, as a
Prussianised wife, to approve, had become more than she could bear; and
in the last Act we find her in a Luxembourg hotel on her way home to
England under the care of _Lord_ and _Lady Lushington_. It is the 4th of
August, 1914; Germany