Marge Askinforit

price, one ought not to carp. The G.E. says in one extract that she has lost every female friend she ever had, with the exception of four. In a subsequent extract she names six women whose friendship has remained loving and true to her since girlhood. She speaks of a four-line stanza as a couplet. She imputes a " blasphemous tirade " to a great man of science who certainly never uttered one. She says that she had a conversation with Lord Salisbury about the fiscal controversy, in which he took no part, the year after his death. But why make a fuss about little things like this ? If you write in bed at the rate of one thousand words an hour, accidents are sure to happen. But there is just one of the G.E.'s sentences that is worrying me and keeping me awake at night. Here it is?read it carefully : " I wore the shortest of tweed skirts, knickerbockers of the same stuff, top-boots, a cover-coat, and a coloured scarf round my head." And all very nice too, no doubt. But consider the terrific problem involved. She does not say that the skirt and knickerbockers were made of the same kind of stuff. If she had, I could have understood it, and my natural delicacy would for ever have kept me from the slightest allusion to the subject. What she does say is that the skirt and knickerbockers were made of the same stuff. That is very different, and involves hideous complications. Firstly, it must mean that the knickerbockers were made out of the skirt. Well, th... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.