she seems to have done her
successful best to add to. "This is a beastly place!" was her written
comment upon St. Michel; and it was typical of her attitude throughout.
Of course the real trouble with _Anne_ was something deeper than drains
or crowded hotels or the smell of too many omelettes: she was in love.
Apparently she was more or less in love with two men, _Dragotin
Voinovich_ (whose name was a constant worry to _Anne's_ aunt, and I am
bound to say that I share her feelings about it) and _Jimmy Fordyce_, a
pleasant young Englishman who pulls the girls out of quicksands and
makes himself generally agreeable. In the end, however--but on second
thoughts the end, emotionally speaking, of _Anne_ is just what I shall
not tell you, as it is precisely the thing that redeems the book from
being commonplace. This you will enjoy; and also those remarkably real
descriptions of various plage-hotels in August, the noise, the crowds,
the long hot meals, the sunshine and constant wind, the sand on the
staircase, and the general atmosphere of wet bathing-gowns--all these
are a luxurious delight to read about in a comfortable English room.
Miss Mary Findlater evidently knows them.

* * * * *

Dippers who have given a new meaning to the classical motto, _Respice
finem_, are so common amongst novel readers that Patricia Wentworth will
only have herself to thank if many who are unfamiliar with her work fail
to do justice to a book nine-tenths of which is thoroughly interesting
and excellently well-written. As a boy, the hero of _Simon Heriot_
(Melrose) is misunderstood, and although _Mr. Martin_, his step-father,
is a somewhat stagey specimen of the heavy and vulgar papa, the child's
emotions (as, for instance, when he pretends that the storm of his
parent's wrath is the ordeal of the Inquisition or some far-away battle
of paladins in which he is contending) are finely conceived, and many of
the later passages in _Simon's_ life--his unhappy love affair with _Maud
Courtney_, his relations with his grandmother and with _William
Forster_, the schoolmaster--are quite engrossing and give occasion for
memorable sketches of character. It is when the natural end of the story
is reached, and _Simon_ has come into his own and has just been wedded
to his proper affinity, that the structure seems to me to fall with a
crash. I might perhaps, though not without reluctance, have pardoned an
impertinent railway accid