The Shadow of Desire. By Irene Osgood. (The Cleveland Publishing
Company, New York.)— The title of this book is un- pleasantly suggestive, and the volume itself, although the author shows clearly enough that she is honestly seeking, by means of careful reading and thinking, to solve some of the problems of the time, contains Some scenes and passages of which the least that can be said is that they also are unpleasantly suggestive. The volume is too decidedly dominated by a certain Will Dunston, with a "voluptuous heavy red mouth," One married woman is infatuated by him. Another not only allows him to kiss her, but in the madness of the moment "gives back kisses hot and fast." He kills this second woman's husband (her second husband by the way), and when he comes for her, she repulses him in a ferocious speech in which she says, "If I have ever yielded to you one moment, it was because you have made the sensual part of my nature your study, and brought all your evil power to bear on it." Perhaps it is unnecessary to say that the woman who speaks with such peculiar frankness secures a third husband after going mad over the death of the second. It is to be regretted that the author of this book had not carefully thought out the problems in which she is evidently profoundly interested, before rushing into pint.
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