Chapter 4

I could wish that _The Escape of Mr. Trimm, His Plight and Other Plights_ (Hodder and Stoughton) had been one continuous whole, instead of a number of separate items, for though Mr. Irvin S. Cobb tells a tale well he has not such a genius for the short story that he needs must express himself through that medium. Moreover, the people of his imagination are too interesting to be readily parted with; I should, for instance, have liked to see how that gentleman convict, _Mr. Trimm_, fared when, after his odd vicissitudes, he was restored to the clutches of the Law and was set on to do his time with the worst of them. There was plenty of criminal company available, for Mr. Cobb makes some speciality of perpetrators of dark deeds, and I feel that all the characters and events of the subsequent stories could, with a little ingenuity, have been worked into the one plot with our fraudulent financier as the centrepiece. That wrong-headed but chivalrous relic of the Southern Confederacy, _Major Putnam Stone_, would fit in as the virtuous or comic relief, his inborn lust for battle and his chance employment as a newspaper reporter being just the things to combat these felonious activities. There is certainly a lack of lovable women in the book, yet I have always been led to suppose that the U.S.A., the _locus in quo_, overflows with feminine charm, and our author is obviously man enough to appreciate and reproduce it for us. However, even a critic must take things as they are, and it is a collection of short stories that I have to complain about. My complaint, then, reduces itself to this, that in the case of each of them I regret their shortness.

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_Mr. Lloyd George (to shade of Pitt)._ "Peace hath her income-tax no less renowned than War."