it is too much to expect her to
explain _how_ she is ingenious.

Mrs. Belloc Lowndes, sister of Hilaire Belloc, is ingenious in a different
direction. Her story of _What Timmy Did_ was one that attracted
especial attention from those periodicals and persons interested in
psychic matters. Here was a woman whose husband had died from
poison--self-administered, the coroner decided--and here was little
Timmy, who knew that something was wrong. Animals also knew it; and then
one day Timmy saw at her heels a shadow man, stiff and military, and
behind him a phantom dog. Mrs. Lowndes's gifts, different from her
distinguished brother's, are none the less gifts.

CHAPTER V

REBECCA WEST: AN ARTIST

=i=

Whether Rebecca West is writing reviews of books or dramatic criticism or
novels she is an artist, above everything. I have been reading delightedly
the pages of her new novel, _The Judge_. It is Miss West's second novel.
One is somewhat prepared for it by the excellence of her first, _The
Return of the Soldier_, published in 1918. Somewhat, but not adequately.

Perhaps I am prejudiced. You see, I have been in Edinburgh, and though it
was the worst season of the year--the period when, as Robert Louis
Stevenson says, that Northern city has "the vilest climate under
Heaven"--nevertheless, the charm and dignity of that old town captured me
at the very moment when a penetrating Scotch winter rain was coming in
direct contact with my bones. I was, I might as well confess, soaked and
chilled as no New York winter snowstorm ever wetted and chilled me. It did
not matter; here was the long sweep of Princes Street with its gay shops
on one side and its deep valley on the other; across the valley the
tenements of the Royal Mile lifted themselves up--the Royal Mile, which
runs always uphill from the Palace that is Holyrood to the height that is
the Castle. Talk about gestures! The whole city of Edinburgh is a
matchless gesture.

[Illustration: REBECCA WEST]

And so, when I began the first page of _The Judge_, it was a grand delight
to find myself back in the city of the East Wind:

"It was not because life was not good enough that Ellen Melville was
crying as she sat by the window. The world, indeed, even so much of it as
could be seen from her window, was extravagantly beautiful. The office of
Mr. Mactavish James, Writer to the Signet, was in one of those decent grey
streets that lie high on the Northward slope of Edinbur