_She_. "IT'S A PITY SOMEONE DON'T CATCH THAT THERE OLD KRUGER."

_He_. "AH, YOU MEAN THE KAISER."

_She_. "AW--CHANGED HIS NAME, HAS HE--DECEITFUL OLD VARMINT?"]

* * * * *

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

(_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks._)

In _The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman_ (MACMILLAN) that impenitent
pamphleteer, H. G. WELLS, returns yet again to the intriguing subject
of marriage, and in a vein something nearer orthodoxy. Not, certainly,
that worthy stubborn orthodoxy of accepted unquestioned doctrine, or
that sleeker variety of middle-aged souls that were once young, now
too tired or bored to go on asking questions, but an orthodoxy rather
that is honest enough to revise on the evidence earlier judgments as
too cocksure and hasty. _Sir Isaac Harman_ was a tea-shop magnate, and
a very pestilent and primitive cad who caught his wife young and poor
and battered her into reluctant surrender by a stormy wooing, whose
very sincerity and abandonment were but a frantic expression of his
dominating egotism and acquisitiveness. Wooing and winning, thinks
this simple ignoble knight, is a thing done once and for all. Remains
merely obedience in very plain and absolute terms on the part of lady
to lord, obedience which, in the last resort, can be exacted by
withholding supplies--not so uncommon a form of blackmail as it suits
the dominant sex to imagine. _Lady Harman's_ emancipation does not
take the conventionally unconventional form, for some deeper reason, I
think, than that her sententious friend and would-be lover, _George
Brumley_, could not altogether escape her gentle contempt; indeed, she
recognises _Sir Isaac's_ claims upon her for duty and gratitude in a
way which modern high-spirited priestesses of progress would scarcely
approve. She fights merely for a limit to the proprietorship, for the
right to a separate individuality, the right to be useful in a wider
sphere (a phrase that stands for so much that is good and less good).
Mr. WELLS has realised this gracious, shy and beautiful personality
with a fine skill. It is no mean feat. He might so easily have made a
dear mild ghost. And oh! if ladies of influence who regiment their
inferiors in orderly philanthropic schemes had some of the wisdom and
tolerance of _Lady Harman_ in her dealings with the tea-shop girls.
You see one instinctively pays Mr. WELLS the serious compliment of
assuming that he has something material to say abo