L 'E MEANT."]

* * * * *

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

(_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks._)

I should certainly call Mr. COMPTON MACKENZIE our first living
expositor of London in fiction. Indeed the precision with which, from
his Italian home, he can recapture the aspect and atmosphere of London
neighbourhoods is itself an astonishing feat. In _The Vanity Girl_
(CASSELL) he has happily abandoned the rather breathless manner
induced by the migratious _Sylvia Scarlett_, and returns to the
West Kensington of _Sinister Street_, blended subsequently with that
theatrical Bohemia in which _Jenny Pearl_ danced her little tragedy.
There is something (though by no means all) of the interest of
_Carnival_ in the new stage story; that the adventures of _Dorothy_
lack the compelling charm of her predecessor is inevitable from the
difference in temperament of the two heroines and the fact that
Mr. MACKENZIE with all his art has been unable to rouse more than
dispassionate interest in what is really a study of successful
egotism. From the moment when, in the first chapter, we encounter
_Dorothy_ (whose real name was _Norah_) washing her hair at a window
in Lonsdale Road, an eligible _cul-de-sac_ ending in a railway line,
beyond which a high rampart marked the reverse of the Earl's Court
Exhibition panorama, to that final page on which we take leave of
her as a widowed countess, sacrificing her future for the sake of
an Earl's Court of a different _genre_, her career, sentimental,
financial and matrimonial, is told with amazing vivacity but a rather
conspicuous lack of emotional appeal. It is perhaps an unequal
book; in parts as good as the author's best, in others hurried and
perfunctory. One of our more superior Reviews was lately debating Mr.
MACKENZIE'S command of the "memorable phrase." There are a score here
that I should delight to quote, even if the setting is not always
entirely worthy of them.

***

So long as "BERTA RUCK" will write for us such pretty books as
_Sweethearts Unmet_ (HODDER AND STOUGHTON), we need never feel
ourselves dependent on America for our supply of sugary novels. This
home-grown variety is just as sweet, and really, I think, may be
guaranteed not only harmless but positively beneficial. The authoress
has evidently a tender pity for the young men and women whom our
social conditions doom either to have no companions among their
contemporaries or only the wron