NOVELS.
A SPIRIT OR MIRTIT.t
Tars is a very cheerful, wholesome, and amusing story dealing largely with modern Bohemia, but neither over- emphasising its seamy side nor extenuating its squalors. Miss Webling, in this book at any rate, is an incorrigible optimist, but her sentimentalism is tempered by experience, and the result is a story in which—given the premiss—the needs of poetic justice are in the main successfully reconciled with the canons of probability.
The premiss in this case is somewhat startling,—that a lady of gentle birth should have married a professional contortionist known as the Human Eel. But once you make the plunge, you will get on swimmingly. Eddy Moore, the Human Eel, was a melancholy, gentle creature of a most chivalrous nature, and our only grievance against Miss Webling is that she should have terminated his amiable and inoffensive existence so abruptly. One can understand the elimination of his wife, as necessitated by the exigencies of the plot, but the brief glimpse we get of Eddy Moore prompts a desire for further acquaintance. The picture of the heroine's early life on the top floor of the dingylodging-house off the Edgware Road makes an admirable beginning. All sorts of queer professional people, mostly connected with the stage,
• Mrs. Gasket!: Haunts, Homes, and Stories. By Mrs. Ellis Pr. Chadwick. London: Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons. [I6a. net.] Spirit of Mira. By Peggy Webling. London: Methuen and Co. [6e.]
lived in Airy Street, and there is a vivid picture of the most prosperous of them all, the redoubtable Miss Sapio:—
" The first-floar lodger, Miss Sapio, was a tall, handsome young woman with tawny yellow hair, wonderful eyes of the same colour, and fine, straight features. She frankly called herself a show woman,' but she was more than that, being quite a clever actress, with a sense of humour and smouldering fire of dramatic passion hidden in the depths of an unawakened, self-indulgent nature. No one knew Miss Sapio's real history, for she had a vivid imagination and a bad memory, so that the stories she told of her life were apt to become confused. She had been married, but sometimes her husband was represented as having died fighting for his country, at others he was casually mentioned as a successful tea-planter in Ceylon—expected home next summer—and all her other connections were equally vague. A certain brother Jack, who figured in her conversation at this period, appeared to belong to the Naval and Military services indiscriminately, except when he was fanning in Manitoba, or attached to the British Embassy in Russia. Her sister Marguerite was sometimes the wife of a professor at Cambridge, sometimes of a country vicar, and sometimes the chatelaine of a grand old manor house in the north of England. Even the story of her pet dog, a tiny liver-and-white spaniel, was wrapped in mystery, for at first his mistress had bought him for a song in Drury Lane, then she had rescued him at great personal danger from the brutality of a gang of roughs in Horton, and then he was the gift of a broken- down man of genius whom Miss Sapio had befriended in his darkest hour. She was an educated woman and could be charming, but long association with people who were mentally and socially her inferiors had coarsened her tastes and warped her finer instincts. Conscious of her beauty, conscious of her deterioration, there was nevertheless something magnificent—something that not only quickened the senses but moved the heart—in the vitality and wasted possibilities of this still young, still attraotive woman. At times she could be terrible, when her tongue was unbridled and her temper uncontrolled, but as a rule she was lazily good- humoured and always generous."
The regeneration of Miss Sapio, through her attachment to a playwright who was a genius—Miss Webling, at any rate,
convinces us of his culture and cleverness by his discourse on, the name " Jane "—forms the secondary love interest of the story, but the real heroine is Phosie (short for Euphrosyne)
Moore. On the death of her father, Phosie becomes the drudge of the slatternly lodging-house keeper. Being a. girl of spirit, though of remarkably good temper, she decides to run away, and persuades another orphan, a depressed and timid little butcher's boy, to accompany her. "Little Gus," though externally an unattractive specimen of the human limpet,
has sterling qualities as well as an original outlook on life, and is only one of the many eccentric figures whom Miss Webling excels in portraying. The two children spend the night in the garden of a suburban villa, which by a blessed chance happened to belong to a benevolent bachelor. He takes them both in, enduring Gus for the sake of Phosie, and gives them a home. We may marvel at the happy chance which led the fugitives to hit on Mr. Revell's garden, but when we get to know that amiable old scholar it all seems natural enough. Phosie becomes his reader and amanuensis, Gus helps in the house- work, and the strangely assorted household continues in uninterrupted harmony until the advent of Mr. Revell's nephew and heir. Jules Revell is a good-looking, vicious youth, who inspires in Phosie a well-founded distrust, and when her old patron dies leaving her a small pension, she prefers a fresh start to remaining on as Jules's wife. A chance meeting with Miss Sapio launches her on a theatrical career, and she has already won distinction on the variety stage when she marries a rich, handsome, and well- connected young man of good family. The marriage was one of pure love on the part of the blameless Phosie, but it very nearly ended in a ghastly fiasco. Walter Race was idle, extremely selfish, and a perfect idiot in money matters. Moreover, as Phosie neatly expressed it, it was "a little trying for the son of a county family to marry the daughter of a Human Eel." What made it more so was the fact that Walter was a snob. The sequel describes how Walter lost all his money and his wife's little fortune, how she supported him during his illness by a clandestine return to the variety stage, how she made a conquest of the relations to whom he had been ashamed to introduce her, and how in the process she so cured him of his selfishness and idleness that he was only too glad to accept a humble position in the business of Phosie's long-lost uncle, a prosperous glove manufacturer. Phosie's conduct throughout is almost too angelic to be true, but the story is told with such a happy mixture of conviction and humour that scepticism is disarmed. The minor characters are all excellently drawn, and there is a lifelike portrait of an old-fashioned actor whose comments on the self-advertising methods of the younger members of his profession, and his habit of thinking aloud, are an unfailing source of amusement.
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