This is another novel of society life like “The Fighting Chance” and “The Firing Line.”  The chief characters in the story are a boy and a girl, inheritors of a vast fortune, whose parents are dead, and who have been left in the guardianship of a large Trust Company.  They are brought up with no companions of their own age and are a unique pair when turned out, on coming of age, into New York society—­two children educated by a great machine, possessors of fabulous wealth, with every inherited instinct for good and evil set free for the first time.  The fact that the girl has acquired the habit of dropping a little cologne on a lump of sugar and nibbling it when tired or depressed gives an indication of the struggle that the children have before them, a struggle of their own, in the midst of their luxurious surroundings, more vital, more real, perhaps, than any that Mr. Chambers has yet depicted.  It is a tense, powerful, highly dramatic story, handling a delicate subject without offense to the taste or the judgment of the most critical reader.

Mr. Chambers’s third novel of society life is

THE FIRING LINE

Its scenes are laid principally at Palm Beach, and no more distinct yet delicately tinted picture of an American fashionable resort, in the full blossom of its brief, recurrent glory, has ever been drawn.  In this book, Mr. Chambers’s purpose is to show that the salvation of society lies in the constant injection of new blood into its veins.  His heroine, the captivating Shiela Cardross, of unknown parentage, yet reared in luxury, suddenly finds herself on life’s firing line, battling with one of the most portentous problems a young girl ever had to face.  Only a master writer could handle her story; Mr. Chambers does it most successfully.

THE YOUNGER SET

is the second of Mr. Chambers’s society novels.  It takes the reader into the swirling society life of fashionable New York, there to wrestle with that ever-increasing evil, the divorce question.  As a student of life, Mr. Chambers is thorough; he knows society; his pictures are so accurate that he enables the reader to imbibe the same atmosphere as if he had been born and brought up in it.  Moreover, no matter how intricate the plot may be or how great the lesson to be taught, the romance in the story is always foremost.  For “The Younger Set,” Mr. Chambers has provided a hero with a rigid code of honor and the grit to stick to it, even though it be unfashionable and out of date.  He is a man whom everyone would seek to emulate.

The earliest of Mr. Chambers’s society novels is

THE FIGHTING CHANCE

It is the story of a young man who has inherited with his wealth a craving for liquor, and a girl who has inherited a certain rebelliousness and a tendency toward dangerous caprice.  The two, meeting on the brink of ruin, fight out their battles—­two weaknesses joined with love to make a strength.