Little Lady Lorraine. By Courteney Grant. (Bentley.)—"Lady Lorraine" is one
of the varieties of the femme incomprise. She has a Platonic affection for Walter Carew, which, when she has married some- one else, she discovers to be a serious passion, and which she is wise, or rather fortunate enough, to turn into a third kind of relation, —a genuine friendship. The author will consider us very mean- spirited, but we cannot help thinking that when a married woman has talked to a man who is not her husband as Lady Lorraine did to Walter in the church at Carlingford, the beat thing that can happen is that she should never see him again. It is all very well for Mr. or Miss Courteney Grant (we suspect a woman's pen under the masculine name) to write fine stuff of this kind—" Walter!' sobbed she, and if for a moment she rested in his arms, if there was one last, one long, fingering kiss, there are pitying angels to forgive, and a pitying Provi- dence to guard, and a justice which is not merciless and unforgiving"— but it will not do in practice. What the angels and Providence might feel, we do not know, but as to what a man would think and say there can be no doubt. We must pronounce Little Lady Lorraine not a very wise book. To literary merit it has no kind of pretension.
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