UNCONQUERED.•
Has. DIVER'S well-written and interesting story has the war es a dominant motive. The two women who are rivals for the hero's affections take up sharply contrasting att itudes towards the war, and, when the hero returns as a hopeless cripple, they differ in the same way as to the possibility of marrying him. The clover but °hallow Bel, who is almost an adventuress, captures Sir Mark by her beauty on the eve of war, and first uses her new power to make him promise that ho will not go, if needed, to the help of Ulster. She then tries, and fails, to keep him out of the war. " It's not fair on me, or your mother. Fighting is the soldiers' busineae. Leave it to them." Bel goes so far alto confront him with the choice between losing her and staying at home in inglorious ease, but when ho decides to give her up she soon relents. Her view of the war, as skilfully suggested by Mrs. Diver, is interesting historically. A great many people three years ago were like Bel in regarding the war with distaste, and re- fusing to consider it as a serious business which we had to face, whether we liked it or not. Bel is not a Pacificiet, but she resents the upsetting of the normal life of society, and her annoyance makes her illogical. Sheila, Sir Mark's friend from childhood, is less selfish and more reasonable and patriotic. It does not occur to her that her menfolk could hold aloof from the war. She looks on their haste to apply for commission as a matter of course; that they will fight and she will work as a nurse seems in the nature of things. This was from the first the prevailing sentiment in most families, as we are proud to remember. But we were as a nation so wedded to peace and so accustomed to hear that war was an obsolete bogy that the imme- diate preponderance of popular opinion in favour of this war n-as somewhat surprising. Sir Mark at heart resents Bel's attitude, and yet tries to make excuses for her. But her lettere to him in France widen the gulf between them, and when he is lying desperately wounded and a prisoner in a French village he begine to see her as she really is, and, against his will, to become persuaded that he has chosen the wrong woman and lost his true mato. When he is brought home paralysed, Bel's selfishness compels her to give him up. We know, of course, that she will do so, but the author manages the incident so adroitly and so naturally that we are relieved when Bel allows her dawning passion for Mark to be overpowered by her love of ease and her dislike of painful things. It romans for the proud man to reconcile himself to his lot, with a determinatiou that, come what may, he will never ask Sheila to take him in his crippled state. We need hardly say that what he refuges to hope for does come to pass, by a well-contrived series of events. But the author refrains from suggesting that a woman engaged to a soldier is bound in honour to marry him if he returns in a maimed condition. It all depends on the woman's character and temperament. Mrs. Diver pleases us by her discrimination in these matters. BM is all the more detestable because she is not abnormal or vicious, but airnply lacks the moral sense. The only situation in the hook which seems
• thiconquered. By Maud Diver. Loadou: Jobs Murray. tea, nat.'
to us strained and unreal is the conversation in which Sheila and Bel deal frankly with their rivalry for Mark. It was necessary that the reader should hear a little of Bel's earlier adventures, but we doubt whether a girl like Sheila would ever have challenged so directly the older woman whom she hated. Mrs. Diver has taken great pains with the character of Mark's mother, and describes the friendship of mother and son in a very charrding way: As we read the book we live through once again those summer and autumn months of 1914 when the teal crisis of the war was being surmounted before most people understood that it had arrived. It is a true picture of the early phases of public opinion in regard to the war, as well as a good love-story.
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