d
of Clare Market. Miss Amber Reeves started out to do good, but has
fortunately repented. She has not written many novels, only three in
five years, an enviable record, and they were good novels, with faults
that are not those of Mrs Barclay or of Mr Hall Caine. Over every
chapter the Blue Book hovered. Her first novel, _The Reward of Virtue_,
exhibited the profound hopelessness of youth. For Evelyn Baker, daughter
of a mother who was glad she was a girl because 'girls are so much
easier,' was doomed to lead the stupid life. Plump, handsome, fond of
pink, she lived in Notting Hill, went to dances, loved the artist and
married the merchant, knew she did not love the merchant and went on
living with him; she took to good works, grew tired of them, and gave
birth to a girl child, thanking fate because 'girls are so much easier.'
The story of Evelyn is so much the story of everybody that it seems
difficult to believe it is the story of anybody. But it is. _The Reward
of Virtue_ is a remarkable piece of realism, and it is evidence of taste
in a first novel to choose a stupid heroine, and not one who plays
Vincent d'Indy and marries somebody called Hugo.

In that book Miss Amber Reeves indicated accomplishment, but this was
rather slight; only in her second novel, _A Lady and Her Husband_, was
she to develop her highest quality: the understanding of the ordinary
man. (All young women novelists understand the artist, or nobody does;
the man they seldom understand is the one who spends fifty years
successfully paying bills.) The ordinary man is Mr Heyham, who runs tea
shops and easily controls a handsome wife of forty-five, while he fails
to control Fabian daughters and a painfully educated son. He runs his
tea shops for profit, while Mrs Heyham comes to the unexpected view that
he should run them for the good of his girls. There is a revolution in
Hampstead when she discovers that Mr Heyham does not, for the girls are
sweated; worse still, she sees that to pay them better will not help
much, for extra wages will not mean more food but only more hats. They
are all vivid, the hard, lucid daughters, the soft and illogical Mrs
Heyham, and especially Mr Heyham, kindly, loving, generous, yet capable
of every beastliness while maintaining his faith in his own rectitude.
Mr Heyham is a triumph, for he is just everybody; he is 'the man with
whose experiences women are trained to sympathise while he is not
trained to sympathise with th