FICTION.
Intrusion. By Beatrice Kean Seymour. (Chapman and Hall. 8s. 6d. net.)—Mrs. Seymour has obtained a fuller mastery of her material since writing Inpisible Tides, and the plan of her new book, Intrusion, is original. She gives an account of the sudden entry of a. brilliant modern example of the type of woman who in Victorian times would have been labelled "professional beauty," into a family of " highbrow " intellec- tuals who live by their ideals and their pens. The Intrusion of Roberta, the butterfly in question, is adroitly managed. She and a young officer who is quite casually taking a walk along the towing path with her are overtaken by sudden torrential rain and rush to the summer-house attached to the Suffields' house at Teddington. Guen Suffield, the eldest daughter and leading spirit of the family, invites the couple in and lends them dry clothes and gives them tea. Just as they are leaving, Allan, the eldest brother, comes home from work, and falls an instant victim to the extraordinary beauty of Roberta. His passion for the girl is, however, not the only departure from the decorous lines on which they move that the family exhibits, for another brother, Jan, has conducted a career of dissipation which causes him quite early in the book to die suddenly of pneumonia. There seems to be not much reason why Jan should have appeared, as his story has nothing to do with the main theme. The whole success or failure of the book really depends on tho realizing of the character of Roberta, and certainly Mrs. Seymour succeeds in conveying the fact of her physical beauty through the cold medium of print. The reader, in fact, feels as does Guen herself— "You couldn't help being sorry for anyone quite so vain as all that." Also, it must be confessed that for a perfectly mindless young person it was no small trial to be set down in the middle of so highly intelligent a family, whom Roberta, not without truth, accuses of being dull. The final episode, in which thu. soulless young person causes her own sister-in-law's fiance to be unfaithful to her, is so devastating in its consequences that the author is obliged to take refuge in a fatal motor accident to get rid of Roberta -altogether. The book is a study in contrasts and interesting as a detailed picture of a large family whose temperaments can be most truly described as being "post-war.'
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