FICTION.
THE ROMANTIC*
IN her novel Miss Sinclair gives an able study of the psychology of cowardice. The first section of the story is concerned with the coming together of Charlotte Redhead and John Roden Conway. Perhaps Charlotte's earlier love affair, not being relevant to the main thesis, is told too much in detail, but this may be in order that her claim to be also a " romantic " may be justified. Her first liaison being at an end, Charlotte falls in love with John Roden Conway, the Romantic of the title, who proposes to her an alliance irregular but platonic, to be lived in close communion with the romance of nature—for Charlotte and her friend Gwennie arc workers on a farm. Which brings the reader to the parenthetical question,Did young lady stenographers before 1915 become Land Girls, and was it only the uniform which was invented to save the country ? Be this as it may, the agricultural idyll with which the first book of the story ends was obviously rudely interrupted, for book two opens with John, Charlotte, and Gwennio, together with a doctor, on board a Channel steamer en route for Belgium in the earliest days of the war. John, whose defective eyesight debars him from military service, is in charge of two ambulances—presented by his father, and offered to the service of the Belgian wounded. The other three form the personnel of his unit. And it is here that the serious interest of the volume begins. The whole party is animated with a spirit of "tremendous, happy adventure," Conway especially feeling the war to be "the most romantic thing that ever hap- pened to me . . . Of course I want to help, but that would be nothing without the gamble, the danger." For a time it seems that the rival McClane Corps will absorb all the work, but at last, at the instance of Dr. MeClane himself, a psycho-therapist who wishes to test the theory he has formed about Conway, the two ambulances are sent out. Conway—" too wrapt in his dream," according to Charlotte's later theory, "to reckon with reality "—only faintly appreciates the danger, and is content to PlaY the second part in the adventure. But later, as the days go on and the physical peril increases, he fails miserably time after time. Yet time after time he goes out again to fresh efforts, the grim reality constantly surprising him, for he is incapable of anagining beforehand the effect of danger on his physical eon- ddion. So the days pass in a rising tide of horror, till at last each attack of cowardice is succeeded by an access of cruelty, and the indulgence in this second evil sends him forth, purged Of his cowardice, filled once more with the spirit of exultation Slid ready for the romance of fresh adventure.
_The book is a notable achievement in psycho-analysis, and • rt. &mane, By Kay Sinclair, London: Collins. Ns. seta Miss Sinclair is to be congratulated en the close study of character which she has given us. The Belgian background cf Kenos Of desolation and bloodshed in the hopeless days of September and October, 1914, is adequately sketched, but, as it is not the chief interest in the book, it is very properly not insisted upon. The novel ends on the note of tragedy. The Pelgian Army is in retreat and Charlotte returns to England, leaving behind her the dead Conway—shot in the back by a wounded German whom he had left to die untended. Yet though living he has killed her love, she is ever haunted by the vision of her untried lover going out with shining oyes to that high adventure which he was so little able to sustain, and saved only by his death from utter failure and disgrace.
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