ap edition with a
highly-coloured cover on the railway book-stalls, while Professor I.
Knowall's wonderful treatise on "What is the Real Origin of Life?" has to
be bought by subscription, with the Professor's rich wife as principal
purchaser.

It is the same in love, where the worst husbands have the most loving
wives, and a good wife lives for years with a positive "horror," and is
never known really to smile until she lies dead in her bed!

It is the same in art . . . and yet it is not quite the same here,
because the picture which "sells," and is reproduced on post cards,
generally inculcates a respectable moral, even though the sight of it
sends the artistic almost insane. And yet, where you can find a hundred
houses the interiors of which are covered in wallpapers which make you
want to scream, you will find only a comparative few who prove by their
beauty of design just exactly why they were chosen--and these rooms, in
parenthesis, are never let as lodgings.

Not that there seems any cure for this world-wide rage for the useless.
We have just to accept it as a fact--and _wonder_! Meanwhile we have to
make the best of the men and women who, metaphorically speaking, would
far sooner sit dressed in the very latest fashion, underclothed in cheap
flannelette, than buy dainty, real linen "undies," and make last year's
"do-up" do for this year's "best."

_On Going "to the dogs"_

I always secretly wonder what people mean when they say they are "going
to the dogs." Do they mean that they are going to enjoy themselves
thoroughly, with Hell at the end of it?--or do they mean that they are
going to raise Hell in their neighbourhood and prevent everybody else
from enjoying themselves? Personally, I always think that it is a very
empty threat--one usually employed by disillusioned lovers or children.
From the casual study I have made of the authorised "dogs," I find them
unutterably boring "bow-wows." Of course, I am not exactly a canine
expert. Like most men, I have ventured near the kennels once or twice,
and made good my escape almost at the first sound of a real bark. People
who are habitually immoral, who make a habit of breaking all the
Commandments, are rarely any other than very wearisome company. What
real lasting joy is there in a "wild night up West" if you have a "head"
on you next morning that you would pay handsomely to get rid of, and a
"mouth"? . . . "Oh, my dear, _such a_ 'mouth'! Appallin