_Theo_, only to fall promptly in love with
another, certainly much nicer, called _Nancy_; and how still a third,
_Sally_, with various other people, intent on rescuing him from
his dilemma, made a most unscrupulous and indeed most improbable
conspiracy against number one, who was unpopular. One can't help
feeling that they were all, including the author, a bit hard on
_Theo_, whose philanthropic notions were really too good for the
amount of sense allotted her to work them out with. Most of the rest
of them would have nothing to do with raising the masses, but, after
the comfortable fashion of early nineteenth-century days, were content
to let well alone at eight shillings a week. Perhaps it was this
restful attitude that decided the publishers to claim for this volume
the distinctive quality of "charm."

* * * * *

After a considerable interval, Mr. ARNOLD LUNN has followed _The
Harrovians_ with another school story, _Loose Ends_ (HUTCHINSON).
This, however, is a tale not so much about boys as about masters,
the real hero being not _Maurice Leigh_ (with whose adventures
school-novelists of an earlier day would solely have concerned
themselves), the pleasantly undistinguished lad who enters Hornborough
in the first chapter and leaves it in the last, but _Quirk_, the young
and energetic master, whose efforts to vitalize the very dry bones
of Hornborough education hardly meet the success that they deserve.
Concerning this I am bound to add that I found some difficulty in
accepting Mr. LUNN'S picture as quite fair to an average public school
in the early twentieth century. That its authorities should have
been so violently perturbed by a proposal to teach SHAKSPEARE
histrionically, or by the spectacle of boys enjoying modern poetry,
surely supposes conditions almost incredibly archaic. This, however,
does nothing to detract from the admirably-drawn figure of _Quirk_
himself, bursting with energy, enthusiasm and intolerance, overcoming
passive resistance on the part of the boys, only to be shipwrecked
upon the cast-iron prejudice of the staff. That his apotheosis should
have been translation to Rugby, where he finds "the beaks much easier
to get on with," perhaps shows that Mr. LUNN does not intend those of
Hornborough as wholly typical of the most abused race in fiction. For
the rest, the boy characters of the book are presented with a quiet
realism very refreshing after some recent "sensat