net.)—The plan of this story is irritating, inasmuch as in
the first section of Part I. the catastrophe, which is to come
at the end of the book, is described, though it breaks off abruptly half way in its accomplishment. Then follows the description of the events which led up to the first chapter. As adumbrated in the first pages, the book ends with the death of the hero's wife in childbed and the hero's marriage on the same day to her sister, with whom for some time he has been in love. Whether this method of anticipating the final catastrophe so that the reader may be fully cognisant of where the events of the story are leading him is a successful form of art, is a matter of opinion. It must be owned that the unresolved discord with which the first chapter ends leaves the reader a little breathless. The main story is a careful study of two families of rather unsatisfactory people. Jim Stonehouse, the hero, has in early youth a stormy love-affair with a married woman, which ends disastrously with her removal to a mad-house. Tired of passionate emotion, he chooses for his life partner, Alice Charming, a beautiful woman whose gentle dignity seems to him to promise a calm and peaceful married life. Unfortunately this self-possession is really coldness, and his wife proves to be one of those natural spinsters who seldom make a success of -marriage, and who shouhl, above all, avoid marrying a man of temperament. Sophie, her sister, ten yean3 younger, grows up during the course of the book, and it becomes only too obvious that she is Jim's predestined life companion. To save the situation she engages herself to another man, and the exigencies of the Service (this part of the story is dated in the years of the War) make it necessary that the wedding should be performed on the day that Alice's baby is born prematurely. The book is a first novel, and as such shows a great deal of promise. The writing is above the average, and the characters, though not particularly interesting, are, at any rate, alive.
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