Page:Critical Woodcuts (1926).pdf/113

 some hours in the shops buying a clear jade elephant and a dull jade lump that swings on a platinum chain, a tortoise shell cigarette case, some Irish lace, ivory opera glasses and considering the purchase of a Poltalloch terrier. She understands that to be a little in love is fun and adds a zest, but one must be careful not to be perturbed by it. She philosophizes thus:

"Funny, hustling, strutting, vain, eager little creatures that we are, so clever and so excited about the business of living, so absorbed and intent about it all, so proud of our achievements, so tragically deploring our disasters, so prone to talk about the wreckage of civilization, as if it mattered much, as if civilization had not been wrecked and wrecked all down human history and it all came to the same thing in the end. Nevertheless, thought Rome, we are really rather wonderful little spurts of life."

In "Orphan Island" I find this yawning bright-eyed satire far less of an affliction—on the contrary, decidedly exhilarating, I suppose because it is directed at the Victorians, and I am gradually beginning to see the necessity of proving the Victorians ridiculous in order to fortify my own sense of progress.

According to the ingenious scheme of this antilltopia, a kind-hearted evangelical lady, Miss Charlotte Smith, undertaking to conduct some fifty miscellaneous orphans from East London to San Francisco, is wrecked on a coral island, with all the culture of an early Victorian evangelical spinster safe in her head. Seventy years later a scientific and sociological party set out from Cambridge to discover and rescue the survivors, if any.

It transpires that the survivors of the castaways number something like a thousand, and they haven't