NOVELS.
THE JOB SECRETA_RY.i.
MRS. WILFRID WARD has written such an interesting and original book in The Job Secretary that the improbabilities of the plot may be readily overlooked. That people closely linked and suddenly severed in the past should be brought together after many years in such a fantastic way borders on the miraculous. Handled by a writer of less subtlety and distinction, the situation would have been intolerable. But, * Toy Dogs and astir Ancestors. By the Hon. Mrs. Neville Lytton. London : Duckworth and Co. [Ws. not.] The Job Ss orsiary An Impression. By Mrs. Wilfrid Ward. London: Longman:, and Co. i4e.13d.] as readers of Mrs. Wilfrid Ward's books will admit without any demur, these are precisely the qualities in which she excels, and the strange story of Frank Norbury's novel is told in a manner which, if it does not carry irresistible conviction, is so artistic and persuasive that we forget the inherent unlikelihood of the strange convergences on which it depends.
Frank Norbury, a youngish man, comfortably off, married to an amiable little Dresden shepherdess of a wife, is a good type of the accomplished, refined, literary amateur. He has achieved a certain success by the graceful decorative charm of his novels, but so far life-likeness—the vis vivido,has been lacking. Nor is this to be wondered at when one considers that he has never eaten his bread with tears or gone through any storm or stress in the whole of his comfortable, well- nourished little life. At the moment we make his acquaintance he is seriously perturbed because the lady who acts as his amanuensis has to go away for a month. A substitute has to be found at once, and the agency to which he applies sends a lady whose incompetence is revealed at the very outset. She can neither type nor write shorthand with any efficiency, and her script, though picturesque, is almost illegible. But Mrs. Carstairs is a lady with traces of great beauty, extremely intelligent, and highly critical; in other words a most interest- ing and stimulating companion. For instead of being devoted to the labours of dictation and transcription, these daily meet- ings resolve themselves into discussions of the novel and the character of the heroine, a femme incomprise, with the result that Norbury is led to reconstruct it on the lines suggested by his secretary. Laura (the heroine) is happily married to a husband who adores her, but her happiness is wantonly ship- wrecked by his sudden infatuation for another woman and his cruel resentment of her very natural jealousy. Now this is Mrs. Carstairs's own story, and its incorporation in Nor- bury's book lends vitality to the portrait of the heroine. He is conscious, however, that the character of the husband is un- convincing and shadowy, and in a moment of unusual expansion discusses the subject before his friends Lady Cromleigh, the widow of a distinguished public servant, and Sir Walter Middle- ton, an eminent Indian official. Subsequently Sir Walter Mid- dleton and Lady Cromleigh independently volunteer illuminat- ing suggestions as to the way in which the characters of the husband and the other woman should be treated so as to give them fair play. It thus comes about that the novel is written by Norbury in collaboration with three other persons, with results which bid fair to transcend any of his previous efforts. He supplies the final literary form, the decorative embellishments, while their suggestions infuse the element of vitality hitherto lacking. We have said enough to give our readers a clue to Norbury's reluctant decision to withhold what he feels to be his masterpiece from publication, and must refer them to the novel itself for the denotintent in which Norbury is rewarded for sinking the artist in the reconciler. We have said nothing of the bearing of this colla- boration on his own domestic life. It is enough to say that the clearing-up of one tangle extricates him from another, and all ends happily. By this achievement and by the ingenuity and sympathy with which she has treated a complex and delicate situation Mrs. Wilfrid Ward has maintained and added to her reputation.
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