THE SPINSTER BOOK.
The. Spinster Book. By Myrtle Reed. (G. P. Putnam's Sons. $1.50 net.)—The Spinster Book does not justify its title until it comes to its last chapter, wherein it discusses " the consolations of spinsterhood." All the other chapters are given up to the consideration of those relations between men and women which, if they do not always end in matrimony, at least find their raison d'etre in the desire of the sexes to attract one another. The volume is most daintily got up inside and out, and the style is infected with many of the delicacies of fashionable "conceit" None the less, there is in the general attitude towards life a rather aggressive absence of delicacy. Miss Reed takes up human nature at the popular farce and comedy level. She has no illusions about either sex. Of man she tells us that "the com- plexities in man's personal equation are caused by variants of three emotions : a mutable fondness for women, according to temperament and opportunity, a more uniform feeling toward money, and the universal, devastating desire,—the old, old passion for food." Her woman is a creature chiefly occu- pied in laying snares to catch the material man, and laying theirs often very stupidly. But there are many clever things said in the book, and many true ones. For instance : "A woman wants a man to love her in the way she loves him ; a man wants a woman to love him in the way he loves her; and because the thing is impossible, neither is satisfied." What people do in America we do not pretend to know. But in England we find it difficult to believe in the woman who sends to a bride-elect a bundle of letters to herself from the bridegroom-elect with the letter Miss Reed imagines ; nor in the bride-elect who has the spirit to make the reply set down for her. Only a pair of Becky Sharpes could have risen to such heights of ingenious malice, and in real life Becky never meets another Becky in battle. But the rather vulgar view of human nature which dominates the greater part of the book is pleasantly abandoned in the final chapter. Some women may spend their lives in angling for men; but all do not, and though matrimony is not to be accepted as quite so bad a business as too many married women would make it appear, yet there are many consolations for the spinster, and chief among them the keeping unbroken to the last her ideal of a husband, and her dream of a home where "Love and Under- standing " reign. It is the belief of Miss Reed that the best con- solation of the spinster is her habit of dreaming of " the Prince" who may still come, and that happiness lies in the purity of the dream, and is altogether independent of actual fulfilment. The philosophy of this last chapter, if not particularly practical, is more pleasant than the materialism of the remainder.
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