A Runaway Ring. By Mrs. Henry Dudeney. (W. Heinemann. 6s.)—Mrs.
Dudeney's portrayal of a tiresome, worthy, and exas- perating family of the name of Baigent can only be described as masterly. The reader will feel that he knows each member intimately, from the well preserved old mother with her middle- class virtues and vices, to the unfortunate youngest daughter, whom the family hound into a fatal operation for fear of her living on to shame them by being an old maid. It must be said that in the description of Dotsie the only false note of the book is struck. It seems hardly possible that even the Baigents would have carried out their theory of life so relentlessly, and the author passes over in silence the role of the surgeons who can only be described as their accomplices. It was certainly the irony of fate which brought the heroine, Fanny, and her reputed aunt, Miss Frusannah Floate. into contact with the Baigents, and although the reader leaves Fanny comfortably established as Mrs. Ninian Baigent and resigned to her fate, he will be inclined to doubt the possibility of this being the ultimate result of Fanny's vagaries in early married life. Ninian, too, is a rather inconsistent character. One cannot believe that such an extraordinarily stupid person could display the tact and romance of the episode on the bicycling tour. The book suffers, as do most of Mrs. Dudeney's works, from there being no sympathetic character among the dramatis personae, but it is very well worth reading and contains at least twice as much careful work as the ordinary novel of the day.
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