The House of Daffodils. By Louise Mack. (Mills and Boon.
6s.)—Miss Mack's writing is, in many ways, commonplace enough, with no especial distinction, either of style or of thought; yet she possesses in abundance the gift of creating atmosphere—not the natural atmosphere of external things, but the reaction of personality and sympathies. She is able to make us feel the crudeness of the family life at " The Daffodils" and the restful simplicity of Richard's home. She has this gift, and yet throws it away deliberately on a story which does not scorn to make use of the most obvious devices of melodrama. Why is it, we wonder, that novelists so often fail to realize that the whole range of emotions is contained in the themes of birth and love and death, that the occasions on which heroines are informed of their own illegitimacy by the hero's father are so rare as to be negligible, and that the many astounding coincidences which occur in The House of Daffodils are outside the drama of average humanity P
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