d soil, subsiding into a compact mass and
travelling before the wind to more profitable surroundings. It will be
admitted that the author has at least hit upon a picturesque metaphor
for a touring company, which on this analogy becomes a very garden of
(Jericho) roses. Actually, however, she no doubt intended it to apply
more to the disposition of her heroine, and in particular to her power
of transferring her young affections, flower, leaf and root, from one
object to another, with undiminished enthusiasm. _Sheelah's_
capacity for being off with the old and on with the new is almost
preternatural; her progress from stage-child to leading lady is
accompanied by such various essays in unconventional domesticity that
the reader may well experience a sense of confusion, or at least feel
some difficulty in sustaining the first freshness of his sympathy. The
story is at times almost startlingly American, as when the original
betrayer of the heroine is excused on the ground that, being English,
his morality would naturally not rise to native level (I swear I'm not
laughing--see page 168); and so full of the idiom of the Transatlantic
stage as to be a perfect _vade mecum_ for visiting mimes from this
side. For the rest, vivacious, wildly sentimental and obviously
written from first-hand experience.

* * * * *

By calling her _Potterism_ (COLLINS) "a tragi-farcical tract" Miss
ROSE MACAULAY disarms our criticism that she conducts too heavy a
discussion from too light a platform. I don't think the author of
_What Not_ is likely to write anything dull, anything I shan't be
pleased to read. She has a keen eye, a candid soul, a sharp-pointed
pen. She is deliciously modern. And she dislikes _Potterism_, which
is sentimental lack of precision in thought. It is much more (or much
less) than this, but I get the definition by inverting a phrase of her
dedication. _Potter_, by the way, or _Lord Pinkerton_, as he is now,
owns a series of newspapers "not so good as _The Times_ nor so bad
as _The Weekly Dispatch_" (guileless piece of camouflage this!), and
_Mrs. Potter_ ("_Leila Yorke_") is a novelist who might have written
_The Rosary_. Two of the young _Potters, Jane_ and _Johnny_, though
they both when up at Oxford joined the _Anti-Potter League_, do not
thereby escape being Potterites. They cling to materialistic _Potter_
values. Whereas an aristocratic clergyman, a woman scientist, a
Jew journalist (thi