NOVELS.
I VENDETTA IN VANITY FAIR.* THE novel of society manners (or mannerlessness) has been produced, or perhaps we should say manufactured, in such quantities of late years that a new excursion into that Somewhat discredited domain of fiction provokes but a languid curiosity in the mind of the expert reader. The ingredients and apparatus have grown painfully familiar. We grow aweary of the doings of the idle rich, of parasitic peers, of the faithful reproduction of the clipped colloquialisms of Mayfair, of the veiled advertisements of fashionable milliners and restaurants, of bridge-playing week-end parties ; in a word, of the portraiture of those who regulate their lives by the "petty decalogue of Mode." But an exception may be fairly made in favour of the novel before us, in that the author has attempted, and not without success, to show the workings of an elemental passion on the minds of confirmed pleasure-seekers. A Vendetta in Vanity Fair is a study in feminine jealousy, and though the virus is diluted by Its artificial surroundings, and has lost its primitive ferocity and single-heartedness, it supplies a continuous driving- power to the two principal characters, whose long duel is described with skill and humour in Miss Miller's pages.
Maud Bellingham and Mabel Crosbie had been at school together, and when the former fell in love with the good- looking drawing-master, Mabel "sneaked" to the authorities. As things turned out, it was really a merciful intervention, as Maud was utterly unfitted to be a poor man's wife ; none the leas, she never forgave the treachery of her friend, knowing it to have been prompted by jealousy. Eighteen years later, at the point where the story opens, the drawing-master is living in poverty with his only daughter in Camden Town; Maud has become Lady Bellingham, wife of a rich, adoring, and easygoing Peer; and Mabel, a widow in easy but not affluent circumstances, is bent on capturing Sir Owen Arminger, a millionaire Empire-builder who is cautiously contemplating matrimony. Lady Bellingham and Mrs. Crosbie constantly meet ; they are on the surface intimates, and call each other by their Christian names ; but the old antagonism manifests itself in a constant interchange of feline amenities, and it only needs an opportunity to convert it into acute hostility. That opportunity is furnished by Lady Bellingham's discovery _ .
• A Vendetta in Vanity Fair. By Esther Miller. London : W. Heinemann. [esa
that Mrs. Crosbie has unearthed the drawing-master, and is extending to him a humiliating patronage. Lady Bellingham, who acts on her impulses with the rapidity of a Slav, immediately descends on Camden Town in a benevolent whirlwind, bestows on Mortimer Herrick—the impecunious artist—a lavish commission for the decoration of her country house, which involves his cancelling his engagement with Mrs. Crosbie, and carries off his daughter Ella to Grosvenor Square. The girl is beautiful, charming, and socially ambitious, and Lady Bellingham promptly conceives the further plan of detaching Sir Owen Arminger from his allegiance to Mrs. Crosbie by throwing him on every possible occasion into the company of her lovely protggge. The plot works like magic for a while, until the spretae injuria forniae goads Mrs. flrosbie into vindictive reprisals. Rushton Coke, a plausible but dis- reputable man of fashion, who has lent money to Herrick, and made dishonourable advances to his daughter on the strength of it, smarting under his repulse, lends Mrs. Crosbie aid in a plot to blacken Ella's character, and consents to hand over letters, written by her in perfect innocence, but on which a damaging construction can be placed. To reveal more of the plot would be to discount the pleasures of perusal; but we may note as the special mark of an ingenious and entertaining story the cleverness which Miss Miller has shown in retaining the sym- pathies of the reader for so strangely mixed a character as Lady Bellingham. One cannot help liking her even in her most outrageous moods; but there is, after all, this great difference between her and her rival, that she is an unscrupulous rather than an unprincipled woman ; and although her benevo- lence is largely dictated by vanity and caprice, one feels that —jealousy apart—she is essentially good-natured. So too with Ella, who remains an engaging and ingenuous figure, in spite of her undisguised and passionate thirst' for the good things which wealth and position alone can secure. The dgnoilment, in which both intriguers are confounded by common Nemesis, is happily compact of romance and retribu- tion, and the unexpected, but well-merited, triumph of the unobtrusive good genius of the story lends a pleasantly old-fashioned flavour to an essentially modern novel.
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