* * * * * OUR BOOKING-OFFICE. (_BY MR. PUNCH'S STAFF OF LEARNED CLERKS._) Miss ETHEL SIDGWICK (long life to her as one of our optimist conquerors!) still keeps her preference for the creation of charming people and her rare talent for making them alive. But I wonder if she is not refining her brilliant technique to the point of occasional obscurity of intention. At least I know I had to re-read a good many passages to be quite sure what was in fact intended. An implied compliment, no doubt; but are all readers so virtuous? ("or so dull?" quoth she). _Hatchways_ (SIDGWICK AND JACKSON) is one of those happily comfortable, just right houses with a hostess, _Ernestine_, whom everybody loves and nobody (save her husband, and he not in this book) makes love to. Holmer, on the other hand, is the adjoining ducal mansion with a distinctly uncomfortable dowager still in command who can't even arrange her dinner-parties and fails to marry her sons to the right people. Perpetually Hatchways is wiping the eye of Holmer, and this touches the nerve of the great lady. Her sons, _Wickford_, the authentic but hardly reigning duke, and _Lord Iveagh Suir_, the queer impressionable (on whom the author has spent much pains to excellent effect), both take their troubles to _Ernestine_. And a young French aviator (this is a pre-War story), guest at Hatchways, analyses and discusses situations and characters from his coign of privilege--a device adroitly handled by the discreet author, who adds two charming girls, coquette _Lise_, _Iveagh's_ first love, and wise, loyal, perceptive _Bess_, whom he found at last. To those who appreciate subtle portraiture let me commend this study.... I feel just as if I had been for a long week-end at Hatchways, anxiously wondering, as I write my "roofer," if I shall be so lucky as to be asked again. * * * * *