The Brighteners of Cricket

THERE are people who want to “brighten cricket.” They remind me of a certain manager to whom I once sent a play. He told me, more politely than truthfully, how much he had enjoyed reading it, and then pointed out what was wrong with the construction.

“You have two brothers here,” he said. “They oughtn’t to have been brothers, they should have been strangers. Then one of them marries the heroine. That’s wrong; the other one ought to have married her. Then there’s Aunt Jane — she strikes me as a very colourless person. If she could have been arrested in the second act for bigamy — And then I should leave out your third act altogether, and put the fourth act at Monte Carlo, and let the heroine be blackmailed by — what’s the fellow’s name? See what I mean?”

I said that I saw. “You don’t mind my criticizing your play?” he added carelessly. I said that he wasn’t criticizing my play. He was writing another one — one which I hadn’t the least wish to write myself.