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Rh perquisite has 'this man who had somehow come into her life'. Somehow and half-dazed are invaluable for throwing a mysterious glamour over situations and characters that shun the broad daylight of common sense.

b. Elementary irony.

A well-known novelist speaks of the resentment that children feel against those elders who insist upon addressing them in a jocular tone, as if serious conversation between the two were out of the question. Irony is largely open to the same objection: the writer who uses it is taking our intellectual measure; he forgets our ex officio perfection in wisdom. Theoretically, indeed, the reader is admitted to the author's confidence; he is not the corpus vile on which experiment is made: that, however, is scarcely more convincing than the two-edged formula 'present company excepted'. For minute, detailed illustration of truths that have had the misfortune to become commonplaces without making their due impression, sustained irony has its legitimate use: tired of being told, and shown by direct methods, that only the virtuous man is admirable, we are glad enough to go off with Fielding on a brisk reductio ad absurdum: 'for if not, let some other kind of man be admirable; as Jonathan Wild'. But the reductio process should be kept for emergencies, as Euclid kept it, with whom it is a confession that direct methods are not available. The isolated snatches of irony quoted below have no such justification: they are for ornament, not for utility; and it is a kind of ornament that is peculiarly un-English–a way of shrugging one's shoulders in print.