A Lady and her Husband. By Amber Reeves. (William Heinemann.
6s,)—There is a great deal of clever writing and pronounced feminism in this book. Indeed, the author puts a tirade into the mouth of Miss Percival, her heroine's secretary, which might have appeared in the most advanced Socialistic newspaper over the signature of a militant suffragette. The plot is on a new model, the hero and heroine having been =silica twenty-six years and being both of them about fifty years of age. The account of how Mary Heybatn is forced by her energetic husband into investigation work in order to fill her time after the marriage of her daughters is very ingenious, and the reader will feel a certain malicious joy when the result of his exertions is the pointing out by his wife of all the weak points in his conduct as an employer. The novel is well worth reading, as, apart front the interest of the adttal story, it is full of entertaining and epigrammatic touches. The dreary life of the ordinary rich woman is cleverly sketched in the following sentence : "A strip of one side of a straight street, servants one hardly spoke to tucked away in the dark, and dear mother in the drawing-room never too busy to realize that the children were not where they ought to be and were making too much noise." Just a touch of kindness of heart and generosity would have made the book notably human. As it is, it is only extremely clever—a very different thing.
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