Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/109

Rh and felt from within as well as from without, with an unimpeachable disinterestedness. The Story of the Gadsbys showed, in at least one scene of that dramatised 'tale without a plot' ('The Tents of Kedar'), a really remarkable gift of dialogue. It was true drawing-room comedy of a high order, and indeed throughout the whole of the piece the talking and gesturing of the puppets were undeniably actual. In the Soldiers Three there was a piece of first-rate dialogue ('The Solid Muldoon,' pp. 45, 46, the talk between Mulvaney and Annie Bragin); but it is obviously one thing to write two pages of conversation and quite another to write eighty. The characters chosen for analysis, however, are on a rather low plane, and prove tedious when treated at such length. Seven pages of the silly delirium of a silly girl are rather too large an instalment of predetermined pathos on one note, coming on the top of two even larger and more monotonous instalments of honeymooning and conjugal 'tiffing.' An obviously much-experienced I.C.S. man of his has a happy phrase for the Anglo-Indian 'society' ladies, married or single. He calls them 'fire-balloons,' and every type of 'fire-balloon,' from the empty-headed little girl aforesaid (whose maiden experience so soon corroborates the touching aphorism of her maiden friend that 'being kissed by a man who