r_ and _Jimmy_, who live with their
widowed mother in an outer suburb of London. That there is art, very
subtle and delicate art, in the telling of it goes without saying. The
characters of the brothers are realized with exquisite care. _Victor_,
the elder, uncertain, violently sensitive and emotional, seeking always
from life what he is never destined (at least so far as the present
story carries him) to attain; _Jimmy_, placid, shallow, avoiding all
emotion, attracting happiness like a magnet. Nothing, I repeat, could be
better done in its kind than the pictures of these two, and of the not
very interesting crowd of young persons among whom they move. But, for
all its real beauty of style, I have to confess that the book left me
cold, and even a little irritated. Perhaps we demand something more from
our heroes these days than susceptibility, or indifference, to emotion.
Was the purpose of life, one wonders, ever as delicately elusive as
these bewildered young men seem to find it? I kept longing for Lord
DERBY. Perhaps, again, this is but part of the cleverness of the writer,
and Miss MEYNELL, like the child in the poem, only does it to annoy. But
I hardly think so. Her tenderness and sympathy for _Victor_ especially
are obvious. He, I take it, is _Narcissus_ (though _Narcissi_ would have
been a truer title for the book, as each of the brothers is more in love
with his own reflection than with anything else), and, since he is left
unmarried at the close of the volume, I derived some quiet satisfaction
from the thought that modified conscription might yet make a man of him.

* * * * *

Why will the heroes of historical fiction persist in that dangerous
practice of leaving an angry and overmastered villain bound to a tree to
await death or rescue? The result is rescue every time, and one way and
another a mort of trouble for the good characters. Still it may be
argued that if the protagonist of _The Fortunes of Garin_ (CONSTABLE)
had not followed this risky precedent those fortunes would not have led
him where they eventually did, and we should have missed one of the best
costume novels of the year. Miss MARY JOHNSTON is among the very few
waiters whom I can follow without weariness through the mazes of
mediaevalism. This tale of the adventures of a knight and a lady in the
days when HENRY II. sat on the throne of England, and his son RICHARD
princed it in Angouleme, is told with an air th