The Green Mouse

The Green Mouse is a novel by Robert W. Chambers, first published in 1910.

The story turns modern science into a mischievous engine for romance. An eccentric experiment in “electrical affinities” produces a handheld device that claims to locate one’s destined partner.

What begins as a private trial quickly spills into society, where the contraption’s beeps and sparks trigger chance meetings and comic misunderstandings. Motorcars collide, appointments go awry, and the most carefully managed lives tilt off balance as technology becomes an unexpected matchmaker.

Chambers steers the action through drawing rooms, parks, and newspaper offices, blending flirtation with headlines and gossip columns. The result is a brisk social comedy that pokes at the era’s faith in invention and progress.

Buoyant and sly, The Green Mouse reads like a romantic laboratory experiment gone gleefully wrong: a satire of high society, media buzz, and scientific hubris that ends by celebrating the very unpredictability it tries to measure.

"Utterly unequipped for anything except to ornament his environment, the crash in Steel stunned him. Dazed but polite, he remained a passive observer of the sale which followed and which apparently realized sufficient to satisfy every creditor, but not enough for an income to continue a harmlessly idle career which he had supposed was to continue indefinitely. "