n house.

Tasma's efforts to give variety to her work, and keep as far as possible
out of the beaten paths of the Australian writer, have not, however,
quite excluded from her novels characters which will be recognised as
typical. There is, for instance, the young pleasure-loving colonial man
who keeps racehorses, gets deeply into debt and love, and has sometimes
to encounter awkward parental alternatives.

At least three excellent portraits of such men are given. The best is
that of George Drafton, in _In Her Earliest Youth_. In no other novel
are the rough good-nature and loose, slangy talk of the young Australian
sportsman of the upper-middle class more naturally expressed. The
author's knowledge of the cant terms and short cuts in the vocabulary of
the not necessarily ill-educated but supremely careless colonial young
man is almost equal to that of Rolf Boldrewood, who has been listening
to the talk of such men all his life.

Uncle Piper's exasperating 'gentleman' son George is also a noticeably
clever creation in a book full of good portraits; and it is a tribute to
the author's skill that as the story progresses our sympathy for him
increases rather than diminishes, notwithstanding the needless agonies
of rage he occasions his father.

The most vivid chapter to be found in any of Tasma's novels is that in
which Uncle Piper, after witnessing a love-scene between Laura Lydiat
and George, sends for the latter and threatens to cast him off if a
marriage of the pair should take place. Laura is an agnostic and a sort
of 'new woman' who maintains a constant attitude of disdain towards her
stepfather. She and George have spent much of their youth together,
discussed pessimistic theories in Piper's hearing, and generally ignored
him, and made him feel his ignorance in ways very trying to the temper
of a man who, 'now that his money-making days were over, had a passion
for dictating absolutely to everyone about him.' 'He'd talk' and 'she'd
talk,' as Mr. Piper would complain; 'and they'd spout their scraps of
poetry that hadn't an ounce of the sense any good, honest old rhyme
could show; and you'd think, to hear them, they were doing their Maker a
favour by condescending to go on living at all!'

An alliance of this kind between the two people for whom he had done
most with his wealth was bad enough, but Uncle Piper was determined
that it should not become a closer one. Was this not one reason for his
importation of an