st as well as OLGA
HARTLEY, who chronicles but does not explain; and this is a pity, for with
a rather different treatment she might have made her heroine a very
likeable person. Looked at from another point of view, _Anne_ may be taken
as a mild piece of propaganda against divorce. I am glad it didn't come to
that, of course, but I do feel that a cross-examining K.C. would have
discovered a good deal more about Anne's soul for me than I learnt from the
writer of her story.

* * * * *

_John Fitzhenry_ (MILLS AND BOON) is one of those pleasant stories about
people who live in big country houses, a subject that seems to have a
particular attraction for the large and ungrudging public which lives in
villas. We have already several novelists who tell them very ably, and I
feel that some one among them has served as Miss ELLA MACMAHON'S model. The
tale deals with the affairs of a showy fickle cousin and a silent constant
cousin who compete for the love of the same delightful if rather nebulous
young woman, and moves to its _denouement_, against a background of the
great War, which Miss MACMAHON has very sensibly decided to view entirely
from the home front. It contains some fine thinking and some bad writing
(the phrase telling of the middle-aged smart woman who "waved her foot
impatiently" gives a just idea of the author's occasional inability to say
what she means), some quite extraneous incidents and some scenes very well
touched in. The people, with a few exceptions, are of the race which
inhabits this sort of book, and, as we have long agreed with our novelists
that "the county" is just like that, I don't see why Miss MACMAHON should
be blamed for it.

* * * * *

Mr. COSMO HAMILTON lays the scene of _His Friend and His Wife_ (HURST AND
BLACKETT) in the Quaker Hill Colony of Connecticut, the members of which
were typically "nice" and took themselves very seriously. So when one of
them brought a divorce suit against her husband there was a feeling that
the colony's reputation had been irremediably besmirched. Mr. HAMILTON can
be trusted to create tense situations out of the indiscretions of an erring
couple, but he also contrives, in spite of its artificial atmosphere, to
make us believe in this society, though he tried me rather hard with a
scandalmongress of the type we happily meet less often in life than in
fiction. I hope he will not be quite so dental