it rather difficult to understand the ordinary good or indifferent fellow with his qualities and their defects.  I doubt the possibility of such a snake in the grass as Lieutenant Seymour carrying on without getting kicked.  Nor do I think that that simple soldier man, Fortescue, V.C., would have so tamely accepted Dugdale’s betrayal to the woman they both loved of the fact that he had just seen his rival putting a dubious young lady into a cab in Regent Street at midnight.  There is a good deal of thoughtful work in this novel which should be interesting to amateur students of the psychology of war and men of war.

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The latest of Mrs. J. B. BUCKROSE’S genial little comedies about a comfortable world is concerned with war-weddings, their cause, and some hints for their successful conduct.  She calls it Marriage While You Wait (HODDER AND STOUGHTON), and illustrates her theme with the case of a young man and maiden, who dashed, like so many others, into matrimony in the breathless haste of short leave, and came dangerously near repenting at leisure.  Only near, of course; Mrs. BUCKROSE is too confirmed an optimist not to make it clear that the blackest boredom has a silver lining; and I had never any real fear that her nice young couple were becoming more than quite temporarily estranged.  Still, things went so far that Sophia left the cottage where she and Arthur and a cooing dove had proposed to live the idyllic life of happiness-ever-after, and betook herself to the mansion of the local villain; while Arthur cut the throat of the dove (there my sympathies were with him entirely) and relapsed into nervous breakdown.  But Denyer, being only a BUCKROSE villain, which is a very mild variety, packed Sophia home again; Arthur, after the usual crisis, recovered; and the symbolic dove was the only inmate of the cottage for whom the little rift remained unhappily permanent.  So there you are; with the gentlest short sermon to wind up, and a blessing to all concerned.  Perhaps I have read stories more briskly entertaining from Mrs. BUCKROSE’S flowing pen; one feels that her intent here was not solely laughter.  But as a smiling homily, preaching much the same moral that Sir ARTHUR PINERO once treated more caustically in perhaps his best play, her story, Marriage While You Wait, should have at least two sympathetic readers in many scores of homes.

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Whenever I finish a book by Mr. S.P.B.  MAIS I am left with the feeling that he has only to enlarge his horizon to write something worth reading and remembering.  If The Education of a Philanderer (GRANT RICHARDS) had been written, by an unknown man I should have welcomed it as work of great promise.  But the trouble with Mr. MAIS is that he seems to find it perilously easy to write about young school-masters who fall in