The Failure of Success. By Lady Mabel Howard. (Longmans and
Co. 68.) —In Lady Mabel Howard's novel, The Failure of Success, we have a woman who keeps a fortune that does not belong to her, in order to win a min whom she knows to be in love with the girl the money rightly belongs to. For Rhoda Webster's fraud there are excuses—or, at least, adequate explanations—in the past. She may be said to have been conceived in dissimula- tion, and born and bred in fraud. Her mother suppressed the fact of the death of another woman's child, and so secured a brilliant inheritance for her own baby, whom she passed off as the rich woman's daughter, calling herself Rhoda's guardian, and not her mother. Then Rhoda's first and chief friend is a society lady of no principle and infinite fascina- tion, to whom early in the story Rhoda is mAde to say : " You are not good, Cynthia. When I am with you I lose
all sense of right and wrong. You demoralise me—upset me ; you make wrong things appear right. When I am away from you I regain my balance; it takes me a long time sometimes, but I am hopelessly lost when I am with you." But Cynthia was not a party to the concealment of the dying con- fessiin of Rhoda's mother, and it is a clever stroke by which Lady Mabel Howard uses Rhoda's secret remorse for the sin she is wil. fully committing as the instrument of Cynthia's salvation, when the silly woman's flirtations—always considered harmless—have brought her to the verge of a criminal elopement. Rhoda's misery gives her the conviction and eloquence that can check her friend's evil career, but her own repentance does not begin until, by an act of carelessness, she has given her secret away.
Previous page
