Vampires, and Mademoiselle Reseda. By Julien Gordon. (Ward, Lock, Bowden,
and Co.)—This little volume contains two slight but characteristic stories by the author of "A Successful Man," who has now secured for herself a position in American litera- ture by her evidently intimate knowledge of New York society, and her capacity for depicting it in an elegantly cynical fashion. She aims here, however, too obviously at being peculiarly French. There is too much of the merely sensuous in the account given, in the second story, of the love-making of Maynard and Mademoiselle Reseda. It is to be hoped, also, that American middle-class women, however well-to-do, look at life a little less from the sentimentally sell-regarding standpoint than do the divorced Mrs. Ayrault and MTS. Eustis, who almost deserves to be divorced ; and that, in par- ticular, no woman of genuine refinement would classify herself as "a failure," because she is neither a femme mare nor a femme courtisane. There are, however, some surprisingly powerful passages in Made- moiselle Reseda; exceptionally good is that in which is given Maynard's quarrel with Mrs. Eustis for grossly insulting the girl he intends to marry. Vampires is an even less pleasant story than Mademoiselle Reseda, for it ends badly. Considerable, though almost revolting, force is shown in the narrative of the manner in which the flabbily good Paton is slowly done to death by two selfish women,—his wife and his mother-in-law.
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