Of Mice and Women

by MARJORIE RIDDELL

MARJORIE RIDDELL writes advertising copy for a London agency. M Is for Mother, a collection of her light prose which has appeared in Punch, was recently published in this country.

GEORGE is quite wrong to say I’m interfering. Anyway, I have to. After all, I’ve known Sylvia for years and years, and if there’s anyone who should intervene on her behalf it’s me. How can she be expected to give up completely the only life she’s ever known and go trailing after Henry to the Gold Coast? I ask you, the Gold Coast. Only a man would treat his wife like that.

And just to write a book about it, if you please; it would be different if he had to work there. And it will be a waste of time; when he went to Alaska he wrote a book about Manchester. He could perfectly well stay quietly at home and potter round the countryside and drink life in and write a novel about Kent. Like Emily Brontë. If anyone wants to read a book about the Gold Coast there’s no reason why they shouldn’t read one that’s already been written.

George should point out to Henry that it’s all very well to rush round the world but sooner or later he’s got to stop somewhere, and it might as well be right here and now. Poor Sylvia. It would kill her. George should get Henry on one side when he and Sylvia come this evening while there’s still a chance of making him change his mind. If we leave it too long it will be too late.

George won’t, of course. Oh, no. I won’t interfere, he says, it’s none of my business, he says, and where have you put my socks that I didn’t put away on purpose? If a man won’t interest himself on his wife’s friend’s behalf and his friend’s wife’s behalf when they’re both friends, then it serves him right and he can find his socks himself. It’s an extraordinary thing about men that when you say something they don’t agree with they have to argue.

Sylvia’s a nice, quiet, gentle girl. I know perfectly well that she’d like nothing more than a comfortable, settled home-life with children. And both Henry and George ought to realize it. If Henry expects her to spend her life hopping from an igloo into a straw hut and back again then he doesn’t deserve her.

It’s not the life for Sylvia. Not at all. I’m beginning to wish, quite seriously, that I hadn’t planned to introduce them.