Audrey Ferris. By Frances A. Gerard. (Ward and Downey.)— This
painfully powerful story is an almost unique combination of fashionable frivolity, theological controversy, and sweet simplicity of character, converging finally into tragedy. There is nothing in recent fiction more genuinely pathetic than the story of the love and the death of Audrey Ferris, a pure-minded, carefully nurtured, unselfish Catholic girl, who, as can be seen from the first, is too good to live long. Then it would be difficult to say whether the moral contrast between Audrey Ferris and her more showily attractive rival, Olive Middleton, or the theological—it would not be strictly accurate to say the religious—difference between her and her lover, Philip Lennox; is the more skilfully brought out. One sympathises almost as much with Lennox as one does with Audrey ; indeed, one looks at him with the kindly eye of Father Selby, who is one of the minor, but also one of the most satisfactory, characters in the story. Lennox is not, like• her, unspotted by the world; he compromises himself with Olive Middleton, even when she is Lady Asphodel, and head of a "set." He has not Audrey's simple faith; on the contrary, he is a sceptic, though of the worldly rather than of the philo- sophical kind. But towards the end, and under unexpected misfortunes, his better nature asserts itself in every sense, to such an extent that it is hardly possible not to wish that happiness of the conventional kind had been meted to him and Audrey. The greater number of the secondary characters in this book are as well drawn as the principals. It is full of contrasts, and of these none is better defined than that between the two matchmakers, Mrs. Middleton, whose daughter is worthy of her, and Muriel Vavasour, who plays Martha to Audrey's Mary. The "society" scenes through which Audrey Ferris passes unscathed are not the pleasantest, but they are among the most effective in the story. Altogether, as a thoroughly uncon- ventional. yet carefully written novel, teaching a sound moral, indicating a knowledge of the world on the part of its author, but also a belief in the desirability of using that world without abusing it, Audrey Ferris deserves the heartiest commendation.
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