Mr Carter and Miss Dolly Foster talk — about her engagement, his losses, other people's marriages — in a series of dialogues in which nothing is said outright and everything is understood. Hope was a barrister who thought up The Prisoner of Zenda walking home from a court case and wrote it in a month; these 1894 sketches are the other half of his talent, and they are as good as light writing gets. Forty-one plates of painting by Tissot and Millais, from tea-table gossip to drawing-room encounters, catch the social comedy of these London dialogues.
