ne why he took it on. Apart from his
timorous declaration of love, conveyed on a typewriter, there was no
colour in it, and nothing whatever to show why his passion petered out.
I think that the author, in his surprise at the success of _Harold's_
rival, must have forgotten all about it. Mr. HERBERT ROSS was excellent
as _Dahlia's_ father, a pleasantly futile baronet under the thumb of a
sour-tongued managing female, an old-fashioned part in which Miss HELEN
ROUS has nothing to learn. Miss VANE FEATHERSTON, as the lady who
finally absorbed the baronet, did her little gratuitous piece all right.

I cannot get myself to believe that all these intelligent actors are
under any illusion as to the merits of the comedy. With the best wishes
in the world for the success of Miss MARIE LOeHR'S enterprises, I am
bound to regard it as yet another instance of a play where the
attractions of the leading part have a little deranged the judgment of
the actor-manager.

O.S.

* * * * *

[Illustration: _Richard Petafor_ (Mr. HUBERT HARBEN), the apostle of
Materialism and Physical Exercise, trying to convert _Antony Grimshaw_
(Mr. HERBERT MARSHALL), the believer in Mysticism and Armchairs.]

* * * * *

"THE CROSSING."

Mr. ALGERNON BLACKWOOD and Mr. BERTRAM FORSYTH (assisted by Mr. DONALD
CALTHROP) present to us in _The Crossing_ a certain _Mr. Anthony
Grimshaw_, a princely egotist of the poetic-idealist type who gets up on
the hearth-rug and says to his family, "I am a humanitarian before
everything," and things like that, and then wonders why his wife is
estranged from him. He has a daughter, _Nixie_, who is not old enough to
know how bad all this is, and together they hear the wind singing glees
without words (or in Volapuk, but anyway not intelligible to us poor
normals), a thing Mr. ALGERNON BLACKWOOD has been doing or pretending to
do for years without once taking me in.

_Anthony_ is run over and (as we say) dies. After an extraordinarily
tiresome conversation in the morning-room with his friend and his son
and his mother (who are also what people call dead) it dawns upon him
that something odd has happened to himself also. His wife and two
children, after his (so-called) death, become blissfully happy and set
to work to finish his book, that being, as they think, his wish. Well, I
wonder. At any rate in death (as we say) he was not divided--from his
egotisms.