The Pride of Eve. By Warwick Deeping. (Cassell and Co.
6s.)—Mr. Deeping has not paid much attention in the first part of his novel to his individual men and women. He has been content to draw two conflicting types—the type of the man who loves his garden, who fills his quiet, undisturbed heart with the colour and beauty of the world; and the woman whose daily life is a succession of philanthropic jobs and committees, who is "too busy to know about flowers," to whom the parochial institutions of her village are engrossing. The trouble is that the writer enlists our sympathies on the wrong side : he holds up the former type for our approval, and we all unwillingly side with the latter, and cannot but feel that a man who could sit for two days watching a rosebud open would ruin the happiness of any married life. The story becomes far more interesting when Eve, the " second woman," comes up to town, and the rather forced contrasts of the first part are abandoned. Mr. Deeping is happier in drawing a single figure than in crowding his canvas with more or less vague sketches, and he understands to the full the difficulties which lie before a woman earning her own living in London, though it is hardly likely that a girl so dependent as Eve upon the good opinion of men would have been inspired by the spirit of the militant suffragettes.
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