FICTION.
IMPOSSIBLE PEOPLE.* THE title of Mrs. Wemyss's story is deliberately ironical. Joanna Templar and her husband John were " impossible " in the cant sense attached to the word by those who judge everything by the Decalogue of Mode. They had absolutely no regard for appear- ances ; Joanna's dress reminds the reader of the stories of the wife of a famous Prime Minister. She went out to dinner in an atmosphere of tiaras with her bedroom slippers on. Meals at the vicarage—John Templar was a country parson—were movable feasts and a constant trial to the digestion. Joanna wrote John's sermons, and then mixed them up with her own private letters. The eccentricities of husband and wife were endless, but they were the outcome of unselfishness and unworldliness. Indeed, we should have liked Mr. and Mrs. Templar better if they had not been so miraculously magnanimous, so incorrigibly longsuffering, so con- sistently unconventional. An occasional ebullition of anger, even of malice, would have made them more human. They are in another sense from that intended by the author "impossible "— in that they were almost "too good For human nature's daily food." At the same time they were far from being "tedious archangels." All nice people, even worldly people, loved them and wished to know them. They were adored by their parishioners and appreciated by their Bishop. The only bitter drop in their cup was their failure to win the real affection of their adopted daughter. Hope was the child of Mr. and Mrs. Blent, who were extremely poor when they entrusted their daughter to Joanna and John. By the time Hope had been " finished " they had become oppressively rich, and Hope, though in her inmost heart reverencing the Templars, was always more irritated than amused by their oddities. They had failed to cure her of her hereditary snobbishness, and she returned to the shiny halls and " impossible " Tottenham Court Road splendours of her father's mansion, not because she liked them, but because she was sure of a handsome allowance and a good time. By a mixture of poetic justice and Nemesis, however, she was thwarted in her matrimonial designs by another protegee of the Templars, the adopted daughter of a poor village woman,
• Impossible People. By Mrs. George Wemyss. London : Constable and Co. net.1 who entered their service. Alilly Don was amazingly beautiful, but her parentage was " wropt in mistry." Cured of kleptomania, and instructed in photography and other arts, she ultimately justified all the care of her benefactresses, and married a brilliant young explorer; while the dashing Hope had to put up with a posing journalist, who redeemed himself in the war, after she had eloped with a very rich man. Meanwhile John Templar had died, and Joanna adopts Hope's three deserted children. The plot bristles with improbabilities ; but that does not matter. It provides Mrs. Wemyss with abundant opportunities for a constant discharge of wise, witty, tender, and flippant sayings. Sometimes the coruscation is too pyrotechnic ; of', to vary the metaphor, the effort to supply a sting to the tail of every sentence fatigues the reader. But as an "impossible" story it is very good reading, and would be better if it were not quite so clever.
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