woman in love—it makes her quite vain-glorious.

I wonder why love always seems such a splendid "joke" to those who are out of it, when it was a paralysing reality while they were in it. And yet, as one looks back upon one's love affairs one invariably refers to the incident as the time when "I made a fool of myself." And yet love is no laughing matter. Considering that ninety-nine per cent. of our novels and plays are about nothing else; considering that our songs and our poetry, and the scandal we like to hear, all centre around this one theme, we really ought to take it more seriously. But if we see two lovers making love to each other we laugh outright. It is very strange! I suppose it is that everybody else's love affairs are ridiculous; only our own possess the splendour of a Greek tragedy. Perhaps we share with Nature her sense of humour, which makes love one of the biggest practical jokes in life. So we jeer at love in order to hide our own "soreness," just as we laugh at the man who sits down suddenly in Piccadilly because his foot stepped on a banana skin—we laugh at him because it wasn't we who sat down. Altogether love is a conundrum, and we laugh at the answer Fate gives us because we dare not show the world we want to cry. Laughter is the one armour which only the gods can pierce. Lovers never laugh—at least, they never laugh at love—that is why we can turn them into such glorious figures of fun.

But I always wonder why a woman of a "thousand loves" assumes a kind of "halo," when a man of equal passion only gets called a "libertine," if not worse things. I suppose we think it must have been so clever of her. We speak of her as inspiring love, though a man who inspires the same wholesale affection isn't considered nice for young women to know. It is, apparently because we realise that a woman very rarely loses her head in love. She may have had a thousand lovers, but only made herself look a "silly idiot" over one. But a man looks a "silly idiot" every time. We know he must have uttered the usual eternal protestations on each occasion. But a woman only has to listen, and can always hear "the tale" without losing her dignity. She merely begins to talk when a man comes "down to earth." While his "soul" had soared verbally she enjoyed him as she enjoys a "ballad concert," those love songs which say so much and mean so very little.

Pompous Pride in Literary "Lions"

I always think that the author who places his own photograph as an illustrated frontispiece to his own book must be either an exceedingly brave man or an exceedingly misguided one. At any rate, he runs a terrible risk, amounting almost to certain calamity, in regard to his literary admirers. I have never yet known an author—and this applies to authoresses as well—whose face, if you liked his work, was not an acute disappointment the moment you clapped eyes upon it. For example, I am a devoted admirer of "Amiel's Journal", but it is years since I have torn Amiel's photograph from the covers of his book. I could not bear to think that such lovely, such poetical thoughts, should issue from a man who, in his portrait, anyway, looks like nothing so much as a melancholy Methodist minister, the most cheerful characteristic of whom is "Bright's disease."

In the days of my extreme youth I admired a well-known authoress—in public, be it understood, as is the way of youth. The world was given to understand that in her seductive heroines she really drew her own portrait. This same world lived long in blissful ignorance that what was stated to be a fact was only the very small portion of a half-truth. For years this famous lady refused to have her photo published. She even went so far as to tell the world so in every "interview" which journalists obtained from her—either regarding her views on "How best to obtain an extra sugar-allowance in war-time," or concerning "Queen Mary's noble example to English women to wear always the same-sort-of-looking hat." This extreme modesty piqued the curiosity of her ten million readers enormously. The ten million, of which I was a member, imagined that she must be too beautiful and too elegant to possess brains, unless she were a positive miracle. We pictured her as tall and graceful, with a lovely willowy figure and an expression all sad tenderness when it wasn't all sweet smiles.

Then one fatal day the famous authoress decided—too late, I'm afraid, by more than twenty years—to show her face to the ten million worshippers who demanded so greatly to see it. The irrevocable step being taken, disillusion jumped to our eyes, as the French say, and nearly blinded us. Instead of the goddess we had anticipated, all we saw was, gazing at us out of the pages of an illustrated newspaper, an over-plump, middle-aged "party" with no figure and a fuzzy fringe, who stood smiling in an open French window, and herself completely filling it! The shock to our worship was so intense that it made most of us think several times before spending 7_s_. on her new love story, were it ever so romantic. And so that was the net result of that!

Wiser far is the other well-known authoress, who apparently had her last photograph taken somewhere back in the early nineties, and still sends it forth to the press as her "latest portrait study," which, perhaps, if she be as wise as she is witty, it will for ever be.

No, I think that authors who insist upon their own photographs appearing in their own books are either very foolish or puffed out with pompous pride. Nobody really wants to look at them a second time; or, even if they do, nine times out of ten those who stay to look remain to wish they hadn't. I have never yet known an author's face which compared in charm and interest with the books he writes. Taking literature as a professional example, it cannot truthfully be said that beauty often follows brains. In the case of authors, as in so many other cases, to leave everything to the imagination is by far the better policy in the long run. But there is this consolation, anyway—we are what we are, after all, and our faces are very often libels on our "souls."

Granting this, the theory of the resurrection of the body always leaves me inordinately cold. As far as I, myself, am concerned, the worms can have my body—and welcome. May I prove extremely indigestible, that's all! Preferably, I want to "cease upon the midnight without pain," in the middle of a dynamite explosion. I want, as it were, to return to the dust from which I came in one big bang! And if I must have a Christian burial, then I hope that all of me which remains for my more or less sorrowing relatives to bury, decently and in order, will, at most, be one—old boot! Of course, if I do die in the middle of an explosion, I grant that, if the resurrection of the body really be a fact, then I shall find it extremely tiresome to hunt everywhere for my spare parts. It will be such a colossal bore having to worry all the other people, also busy collecting themselves, who went up with me in the "bang," by keeping on demanding of them the information, "Excuse me, but have you by any chance seen anything of a big-toe nail knocking about?" I always feel so sorry for those Egyptian princesses whose teeth and hair, whose jewels and old bones, proved such an irresistible attraction to the New Zealand and Australian soldiers when they were in camp near Cairo, that they stole out at night to rob their tombs, and sent the plunder thus obtained "way back home to the old shack" as souvenirs of the Great War. It will be so perfectly aggravating for these royal ladies to resurrect in a tomb which, in parenthesis, they had purposely constructed to last them until the Day of Judgment—to resurrect therein, only to discover that some of their necessary parts are either in Auckland, or in Sydney, or in Melbourne,