Dear Sir, - So once again, in the current double number (December 28th), your correspondent "G. F." has treated you to a grumble, this time in surpassing bad taste! It says much for your forbearance and your faith in your readers' forbearance that you printed it all, and did not merely include your own justly scathing comment in one of your occasional columns of "Answers to Correspondents" - such correspondents, presumably, as you think will be merely boring! I wonder what G. F.'S" own particular fad may be, and whether there are readers of London Life on whom it reacts as violently as monopody apparently does on him (I suppose he's a "he;" the tone of his letter doesn't suggest the gentler sex!). If so, let's hope for their own sakes they don't express their feelings quite so tactlessly!
Any-old-how, recent letters from and about monopedes (so far from "hopping out of your pages"!) have been gratifying, numerous and interesting, even though few of them call for special comment. How invincible Miss "Peggy's" sense of humour, when she can see the funny side of the appalling mishap she detailed so drolly in the leading letter in your "Christmas Annual!"
Then again, in the same issue, Miss "Singleton's" three delightful sketches of herself illustrate most vividly the immense superiority of drawings as vehicles for information over small-scale photographs as ordinarily reproduced. How much more intimately one feels one knows this young lady than any recent subjects of readers' photographs, even photographs as admirable as those of "Erica and Eve" and Mrs. "House-hound!" How tantalising the decidedly fuliginous photograph of that charming girls, "Miss One-legged Equanimity!" So little justice does it to her lively personality that I have amused myself by re-drawing it as best I might.
Finally in the current number, "Monopede Admirer" has my heartiest felicitations! He certainly makes one realise the verisimilitude of the opening scene of Mr. Stort's story of
"Anthony Drew," quite the most remarkable description of the effect of sudden strong emotion on the susceptible young human male that I remember reading, and that certainly squares with certain experiences of my own, similar, though, of course less utterly devastating, whereof I may some day feel like writing.
Till then, perhaps, Mr. Editor.
Yours truly,
"C. D. B."