The Soul of Milly Green. By Mrs. Harold Gorst (Cassell
and Co. 65.)—Mrs. Harold Gorst always writes with a purpose, and in this book she shows with relentless detail the decline and fall of her heroine, a woman of very weak character with nothing but a pretty face to recommend her. Mrs. Gorst dedicates her book to the average respectable man, whose soul she very properly wishes to wring by showing the harm done by the breaking of the Seventh Commandment. But it is hardly possible that the average " respectable " man would have behaved in the way ascribed to Mr. James Gurney. The real harm in this book is done neither by the neglectful husband nor by the lover, but by the system of education which could bring up a girl like Milly to perform her domestic duties so disastrously that the end could only be a tragedy. The girl who is so unfit for her duty as wife and mother that her child has to be taken away from her and brought up by its grandmother fhr its own sake cannot possibly make a success of life. Mrs. Gorst's heroine would always have been a fool ; but if during her schooldays a truer ideal of woman's work had been set before her, and a little training in woman's natural duties given her, she would at any rate have had a weapon put into her hand with which to fight for her own soul.
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