OTHER NOVELS
The Laughing Heart. By Beatrice Sheepshanks. (Selwyn and Blount. 7s. 6d.)-This is a decidedly interesting novel, though the reader will ask himself in vain to whom the laughing heart is supposed to belong. The story is concerned with a very modern family, in which the youngest daughter, who is even more emancipated than the others, discovers that she is going to have a baby. Instead of seeking a refuge for the family in a crowded town where they would attract little attention, Nancy, the second daughter, the only person who even attempts to be practical, takes a house in Sutherlandshire near friends, and their stay there, of course, ends in the whole story becoming public property. The subsidiary characters are very amusingly sketched and are on the whole more successful than Nancy or the exceedingly shadowy _young member of Parliament who it may be supposed does: duty as the hero. Mrs. Osborne and her drugs on one side, and Miss Torrie, the doctor's sister, are well worked out figures, which emphasize the weak points respectively of the Georgian and Victorian female. But surely Mrs. Sheepshanks has populated her Scottish villages with an almost undue proportion of eccentrics. The end of the book will give the convinced student of Eugenics pause. It is, perhaps, quite natural for the unfor- tunate Nancy, when she finds out that her father died in an asylum, first to try to commit suicide and then allow herself to be saved by her lover, but by cold daylight next morning the spectre of heredity would have raised its head as stark and forbidding as ever.
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