Stung to the Quick. By Mrs. G. Linmeus Baztks. (Gri
i th, Farran, and Co.)—In this story Mrs. Linnoaus Banks provides a certain surprise for her readers. She has long ago taken her place among writers of novels as an expert in the depicting of English North-country character and the telling of English North-country stories diversified with incident. But in her new book she demonstrates that she can draw a character endowed with a positively melodramatic intensity of vindictiveness. Rhoda Wearbank, the girl who is "stung to the quick" by the revelation that she is a waif, the illegitimate daughter of a woman that nobody owns or knows, and proceeds to revenge herself on the little society in which she figures, and even to play the viper in the bosom that has cherished her, is certainly a most unpleasant person. Her treacherous malignity occasionally becomes ridi- culous, as when she dresses herself up in man's clothes as an expedient to help in alienating one of the two girls she specially detests. But her hatred is well sustained from the beginning of the book to the end, and the devices which she adopts to induce Frank Raeburn to disbelieve in his wife are very clever. Eva and Lily, the two girls on whom Rhoda wreaks her unreasonable wrath, are both well drawn, and Mrs. Hesketh is an almost Marryatish vixen. Nor, although Mrs. Banks has in her new novel gone in more decidedly for sensational incidents than she has ever done before, does sho show any falling-off in her original and proper work of depicting Yorkshire life and character.
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