from all this and an occasional obscure sentence there is nothing much to grumble at in a story that tells how David, the sailor, unlearned in the ways of ladies, became engaged for insufficient reasons to one 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.”

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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 “sensational revelations.”  Mr. LUNN’S boys, alike in their speech and outlook, are admirably observed; indeed the persons of the tale struck me throughout as being better than its rather out-of-date happenings.

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