- LIKE A ROSE. By Mar g aret Peterson. (Senn. 7s. 6d.)
—Here is a melting, luxuriously sorrowful tale of .a- -girl with gold hair, and "- perfect limbs," and a character which, the wrapper informs us, is a " thing of fragile beauty," like a rose. Of the fragility there is no doubt. Early in the book Jennifer gives her soul to her cousin Billy. But he must go tO Africa awhile, so, when she finds that her body is the price of a stage success in Robert Harland's show, she hardly-thinks twice about it. When Billy is due home, it suddenly occurs to- her that he may not understand," so she settles her difficulty by running away from her stardom. Then Billy, who has married her when she is very ill, realizes that she is both unfaithful and untruthful, and, being something of a Galahad, takes some time to get over it. So Jennifer dis- appears into the underworld of London and Paris for three years. Lovely and wistful as ever, she then becomes the playinate of a mysterious RUssian prince:Who is assassinated by 'the' useful 'Bolshevist 'at a masked ball, so that Billy, reappearing, may learn that she has ever kiVed Mai alone. As he still takes a few hours for meditation, she absorbs some poison, and is revealed to him lying dead in exquisite raiment —hie a rose. Silken lingerie, sentimental voluptuousnesii, and lingering pathog—the *hole thing is dexterously served up for certain tastes. Quotations from Rossetti's very unsentimental " Jenny " make an Odd appearance."Jennifer is a brainless, graceless little cocotte ; and the entire psychology is funda- mentally false. But that will not deter such novel-readers as enjoy, not roses, but pink fondants, from finding it much to their liking.
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