Tales about Temperaments by John Oliver Hobbes (1902)

 This one includes three long stories and two short plays. They originate mainly from the earlier part of her career in the 1890s. They all have the slight delusion playing in them which a regular Hobbes reader begins to identify early on. This is that her work seems at first glance hopelessly light, a frippery of aesthetic-era dandified talk. Then the subsequent realisation starts to get a little play, as the reader records the fact that tucked into these feathery sentences there is more solid material - there are tinctures and jags in Hobbes which lend the prose a sense of greater directness and sounding. In this instance, however, with that said, the airiness has a tendency to win out a bit more than usual. The overall effect is a little too sheer, let's say. The Worm that God Prepared details an illicit love, and a case of mistaken identity which leads to a stabbing, in a very sudden final change of tone whose unexpectedness is jolting, though effective. 'Tis an Ill Flight Without Wings tells of a dilettante's imagined sole serious love twisting on a simple crux which then falls to pieces as she is revealed to be engaged when finally discovered. Prince Toto was written for the author's son, and involves a bored, never-satisfied fairy prince who needs to be cured by a beautiful neighbouring fairy princess by her becoming extremely ugly through the offices of a witch - all ends well, of course. The first play, A Repentance, is set in the period of contest in Spain between the Carlists and the Christinists, and records the return of a presumed dead count to his countess, in disguise as a friar. He has swapped sides, while she has remained loyal to his old ideas, and thought him a martyr. It ends with him sacrificing himself in capture. The second play, Journeys End in Lovers Meeting (not sure about missing possessives, if there indeed are any), is about two married lovers who struggle through their recent history in a battling conversation while her visitor-who-would-like-to-be-a-lover hides in the next room. It was written for Ellen Terry and performed by her in two runs. Not a prime Hobbes volume, but not dismissable either.