FICTI bT.
UNEASY MONEY..
IF it is hard to think that this story was written during the war, we are not the less grateful to Mr. Wodehourte for providlog us with so agreeable an anodyne. Uneasy Money is a remain° of the Peerage ; an impecunious young nobleman being suddenly endowed with wealth beyond the dreams of avarice by the freak of an American millionaire, whom he bad cored of " slicing " at golf. Lord Dawlisle wee a charmingly amiable if somewhat inarticulate young man with some unremunerative accomplishments; and a fund of unobtrusive kindliness. His contributions to the dialogue are negligible, but he reveals himself in action, and the revelation is always agreeable, At the opening of the story he is engaged to a beautiful young woman who bad gone on the stage and achieved a success more than proportioned to her talents, yet falling Par abort of her ambition. But Claire Fenwick is in no hurry to marry Bill (Lord Dawlish " was the sort of young man whom one instinctively called Bill ") so long as he only had £400 a year as the secretary of a club, and she is perpetually nagging at him to exploit his rank or his acquaintanceship to augment his income without any regard for his sense of justice or dignity or his love of fair dealing. She had no far worked upon him as to induce him to make a trip to America, when the freak will revolutionised his position; but he resolved to go out all the same, with the laudable desireof persuading the millionaire's disinherited nephew and niece to accept half the money. And with a wisdom that cannot be too highly commended, he refrained from enlightening his fioneie as to hie entity or its motive. How by one of those coincidences peneissible to romantic novelists Claire also went out to America at the same time to stay with an actress friend; how they met in circumstances over which Bill had no control but which broke of the engagement ; how he fell in love under an alias with the mieionaire's disinherited niece, and won her affections by his skill in handling bees ; how Claire, In too great a hurry to be on with the now love before she woe off with the old, made a futile effort to recapture Bill, andthen vindictively sought to part him from the bewitching bee-keeper; and how the discovery of a later will enabled Elisabeth (the bee- keeper) to camel her rash decision—for enlightenment on all these questions and a great deal of hilarious illustrative incident bearing on the manners and customs of motor.rnagnetes, titled • ' chemical " dancers, publicity agents, and semi-domesticated monkeys we must refer our readers to the pages of Uneasy Money. Mr. Wodehoune knows certain aspects of New York as well as he knows London, and he has given on a light- hearted entertainment with no lack of good feeling underlying its nudges frivolity.
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