Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/382

10

Mr. Sullivan’s book is a sheer delight. Conceived in a spirit of satiric comedy, it is packed with witticisms that keep the reader chuckling happily to himself from the first page to the last.

To Molding-on-the-Ooze, in “the lowest, flattest and dampest section of the Midlands,” the seat of Henry Hardinger, Esq., come Colonel and Mrs. Bostwick, desiring its owner as a husband for their daughter Grace. Henry (who looks on life “as something between a polo match and a satiric comedy”) has no money: the Colonel has no money: each is ignorant of the other’s want: each sees in Grace a solution of his difficulty. Every one takes a hand in the game of deceits, and as all concerned are both deceivers and deceived, the complications and the fun can be imagined.