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There is a smack of the Early Besantine about the earnest scion of a noble house who decides to share the lives and lot of common and unwashed men with an eye to the imminent appearance of the True Spirit of Democracy in our midst.  Such a one is the hero of Miss MAUD DIVER’S latest novel, Strange Roads (CONSTABLE); but it is only fair to say that Derek Blunt (ne Blount), second son of the Earl of Avonleigh, is no prig, but, on the contrary, a very pleasant fellow.  For a protagonist he obtrudes himself only moderately in a rather discursive story which involves a number of other people who do nothing in particular over a good many chapters.  We are halfway through before Derek takes the plunge, and then we find, him, not in the slums of some industrial quarter, but in Western Canada, where class distinctions are founded less on soap than on simoleons.  At the end of the volume the War has “bruk out,” and our hero, apart from having led a healthy outdoor life and chivalrously married and been left a widower by a pathetic child with consumption and no morals, is just about where he started.  I say “at the end of the volume,” for there I find a publisher’s note to the effect that in consequence of the paper shortage the further adventures of our hero have been postponed to a subsequent volume.  It is to be entitled The Strong Hours, and will doubtless provide a satisfactory raison d’etre for all the other people who did nothing in particular in Vol.  I.

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If you had numbered Elizabeth, the heroine of A Maiden in Malaya (MELROSE), among your friends, I can fancy your calling upon her to “hear about her adventures in the East.”  I can see her delightedly telling you of the voyage, of the people she met on board (including the charming young man upon whom you would already have congratulated her), of how he and she bought curios at Port Said, of her arrival, of her sister’s children and their quaint sayings, of Singapore and its sights, of Malaya and how she was taken to see the tapping on a rubber plantation—­here I picture a gleam of revived interest, possibly financial in origin, appearing in your face—­of the club, of dinner parties and a thousand other details, all highly entertaining to herself and involving a sufficiency of native words to impress the stay-at-home.  And perhaps, just as you were considering your chance of an escape before tea, she would continue “and now I must tell you all about the dreadful time I had in the rising!” which she would then vivaciously proceed to do; and not only that, but all about the dreadful time (the same dreadful time) that all her friends had in the same rising, chapters of it, so that in the end it might be six o’clock or later before you got away.  I hope this is not an unfair resume of the impression produced upon me by Miss ISOBEL MOUNTAIN’S prattling pages.  To sum up, if you have an insatiable curiosity for the small talk of other people’s travel, A Maiden in Malaya may not prove too much for it.  If otherwise, otherwise.