NOVELS.
lat. EXPENSIVE MISS DU CANE.*
IT bas been reserved for Miss Macnaughtan, who has already rendered many other kindly services to the novel-reading public, to rehabilitate the sadly tarnished reputation of the country-house party. For some years past we have endured a succession of more or less realistic descriptions of the week- end carnivals of the idle rich, until the arrival of a novel in which the scene is laid in a "stately home" on the Yorkshire moors in September, and yet the note is not that of urbs in rare, and the majority of the company are well bred and amiable, is a most welcome innovation. It may be the unfortunate truth that leisure and ample means too often vulgarise their possessors, but there are exceptions, and we ake grateful to Miss Macnaughtan for introducing us to a circle of acquaintances whose humanity is so little untainted by the qualities dear to most contemporary chroniclers of high life. Yet it must not be supposed that she views life through rose-tinted glasses. Her optimism is far from being uneriticaL The novel is in a sense a novel without a hero, since the aspirant to the beau ,'Ile lamentably fails to rise to his opportunity, though two of the elder men are as good as gold. Nor, again, is Miss Macnaughtan disposed to glorify her sisters without exception. Miss Florrie Ellis is frankly a husband-hunter, and the angularity as well as the solid merits of a certain type of modern girl are relentlessly set down in the admirable portrait of Charlotte Balfour
"Charlotte had had one dozen lessons in almost every branch of knowledge and of art. She spoke with perfect assurance and with technical accuracy upon every point connected therewith, and had a separate vocabulary for each of her crafts. She would probably have accepted the command of the Channel Fleet at twenty minutes' notice. She knew but little of music, but she possessed a baton and superb self-confidence, and a dozen lessons had made her a very fair bandmaster. Her wood-carving (after a dozen lessons) had taken prizes at the local flower shows ; her hen-keeping was a success where others failed. It seemed as though even Charlotte's hens were infected with her desire to live the strenuous life, and they laid more eggs than other hens could reasonably be expected to do. 'I hate stupidity: Charlotte used to say, 'and I detest the expression "uncon- genial work." No work should be uncongenial. If I were a charwoman, I should be the best charwoman that ever scrubbed a floor. One may always be best at something. I can't tolerate non-success: Hugh Latimer accepted unconditionally all her statements about her own proficiency. He walked with her now to the village recreation-room, and stayed until she had mounted the platform and rapped attention on a metal music-stand with her baton. The little figure seemed to him all that was admirable. The professional waves and cuts which she made in the air impressed him enormously—Charlotte had told him how well she did it. • There is very little she can't do,' he said to himself, as he walked homewards. And this very wholesome state of mind had been engendered in the yofing man by a little woman whom Nature had not too finely dowered, and whose position in her uncle's house might have been one of dependence or insignifi- cance, but who, being gifted with that heaven-sent blessing, a completely self-reliant nature, could persuade without an effort a man of considerable learning and of very high attainments that
• Ti., Emmaus Pus Ds Cane, By S. biecnaughtan. London: W. Heine. moan. Du.]
Charlotte Balfour was a person of no ordinary acquirements. Her keen intelligence made her of service wherever she liked to put her hand, and her energy was as fervent as it was boundless. Charlotte was one of the few persons in her uncle's house who mildly criticised Lady Clitheroe. Charlotte feared that Agnes had a poetical mind; for years she had longed to ask her not to wear a shawl ; and she could never entirely admire anyone who had to lie down for two hours before dinner. The outdoor men at Hesketh worked better for Charlotte than for anyone else, and tho men in the village adored her. At mothers' meetings she was not altogether successful. Her advice to mothers on the upbringing of their children—a subject on which Charlotte always spoke with assurance—was not strictly orthodox. But she had been known to follow a drunken husband into the village alehouse, and lead him out by the sleeve of his coat. She did not believe iii ideals, and had looked up the word in a dictionary to find out what its meaning could possibly be, Short skirts, common-sense and practical usefulness were the limits of Charlotte's horizon. She believed in prose and brass bands. Her days were filled with wholesome interests, and her judgments were sober and well-balanced. She considered tears interesting on their physiological side, but misunderstandings or broken hearts, she opined, could only be ascribed to the workings of disordered minds. Her self-satisfaction was too genuine to be intrusive ; and she welcomed intellect generously when she met it—but was fain to admit that in the country the encounter was rare. As a child she had been snubbed, and there was some- thing admirable in the fact that she had not succumbed to it. In her uncle's house she was genuinely liked. No one ever found her dull, and her life was too detached and too full of interests to obtrude itself upon others ; she had never known the sensation of boredom, and for this reason, if for no other, her society wail sought by those incapable of entertaining themselves."
Charlotte Balfour, who unknown to herself has a good heart, and in the end wins from us something more than respect, is after all but a subsidiary character in the plot. The romance and charm of the narrative centre in Hetty Du Cane, her friendship for her hostess Lady Clitheroe, and her love for that half-hearted, engaging hedonist, Geoffrey Arkwright. The obvious affection which many novelists entertain for their favourites is no guarantee of their ability to bring their readers to the same way of thinking. Paragons are apt to become tedious. But to resist the charm of Hetty and of Agnes Clitheroe one must be singularly hard to please. Rutty is neither brilliant nor exceptionally accomplished, but "just the perfection of sweet reserved womanhood, of un- conscious dignity, and gentleness kindliness and grace!! For nine months in the year she lives patiently in London with an ailing mother and a disreputable step-father. For the remaining three months she pays visits in the country, admired and envied by acquaintances and beloved by her friends. How she came to be called "the expensive Miss Du Cane," and to convey the erroneous impression of affluence, we must leave our readers to discover for themselves. As a matter of fact, her real riches consisted in the devotion of her friends, in her own "august maidenliness," and in the courage and dignity with which she carried out her conviction that people have "not only to suffer, but to suffer well, before they can do any- thing or be anything," a view of life which had also been realised by her greatest friend. The story is not convulsed by storms of elemental passion—the setting precludes high tragedy—but it has affecting as well as shining moments. Miss Macnaughtan has set herself to show how it comes about, with society constituted as it is, that the nicest women often remain unmarried :— " As a woman Hetty Du Cane was as superior to Mrs. Anson in beauty of character as in personal beauty. She made Lady Biddy Hague look vulgar, and Charlotte Balfonr's unconventionality appeared brusque beside her. But Lady Biddy ruled with com- plete satisfaction to herself and her husband her millionaire lord; and fluffy-haired, blue-eyed Mrs. Anson could, as she herself admitted, get her own way whenever it really mattered, and could be magnanimous and forgiving at the same time. Charlotte Balfour had impressed a very clever young English- man with a high sense of her own superiority : and Betty returned to London alone."
In a sense Hetty did not return to London alone. For in a. passage of singular delicacy and beauty the author has imagined her heroine finding solace on her lonely rail- way journey in a vision of what might have been,—a vision of "hearts in equal love combined" so tender and touching as to claim kinship with the immortal "Dream Children" of Charles Lamb,
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