fic
aspect, when lo! there enters a lady with a Russian name, no back to
her gown and green face-powder. If I said of this paragon that she
made the story bounce I should still do less than justice to her
amazing personality. Really, she was a herald of revolution, whose
remarkable method was to invite anyone important and obstructive to
her house and make them discontented. It was the work of half-an-hour.
Whether the process was hypnotic, or whether she actually put pepper
in the ice-pudding, I could not clearly make out. But the dreadful
fact remained that, let your patriotism be ever so firm, you had but
to accept one of green-powder's little dinners and next morning you
were as like as not to hurl a stone into 10, Downing Street. As for
the end--! But no, I will stop short of it.

* * * * *

Frankly, what pleased me most about _Affinities_ (HODDER AND
STOUGHTON) was its attractive get-up; pleasant, cherry-pie-coloured
boards, swathed in a very daintily-drawn pictorial wrapper, the whole,
as cataloguers say, forming an ideal birthday present for a young
lady, especially one at all apt to discover, however harmlessly, the
affinities that give these five tales their title. As for the stories
themselves, really all that need be said is to congratulate Mrs. MARY
ROBERTS RINEHART on the ingenuity with which she can tell what seems
an obvious intrigue yet keep a surprise in reserve. I suppose it is
because they come to us from America that certain of the episodes turn
upon incidents in the Suffrage struggle, tale-fodder that our own
militant novelists have long happily discarded. Of the others I think
I myself would award the palm to one called "The Family Friend," a
genially cynical little comedy of encouraged courtship, of which the
end seems to be visible from the beginning, but isn't. Altogether,
what I might call a Canute; in other words a book for the deck-chair,
not too absorbing to endanger your shoes, however close you read it to
the advancing wave.

* * * * *

I think I should best describe the characteristic quality of
_Four Blind Mice_ (LANE) as geniality. The scene of it is
Burmah--astonishing, when you consider the host of novels about the
rest of India, that so few should employ this equally picturesque
setting--and it is quickly apparent that what Mr. C.C. LOWIS doesn't
know at first hand about Rangoon is not likely to be missed. The
tale