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My studies of recent fiction induce the belief that modern Wales may be divided into two parts, in one of which the inhabitants call each other Bach and follow a code of morals that I simply will not stoop to characterise; while the other is at once more Saxon in idiom and considerably more melodramatic in its happenings.  It is to the latter province that I must assign A Little Welsh Girl (HODDER AND STOUGHTON), the Romance, with a big R, of Dylis Morgan, who pushed an unappreciated suitor over a precipice and came to London to make her fortune in revue.  Really the suitor didn’t go all the way down the precipice; but as, by the time he recovered, Dylis, disguised, had fled for England, he was promptly arrested for her murder, and as Dylis thought she had murdered him there was presently so much confusion (increased for me by the hopelessly unpronounceable names of a large cast) that I found it increasingly hard to keep the affair in hand.  As for Dylis’s theatrical career—­well, you know how these things are managed in fiction; for my part I was left wondering whether Mr. HOWEL EVANS’ pictures of Wales were as romantically conceived as his conception of a West-End theatre.  Though of course we all know that Welsh people do sometimes make even more sensational triumphs in the Metropolis; just possible indeed that this fact may have some bearing on the recent flood of Cambrian fiction.  Certainly, if A Little Welsh Girl achieves success on the strength of Mr. LLOYD GEORGE’s triumph, she may thank her luck, for I have my doubts whether she could manage it unassisted.

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Of Ladies Must Live (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) one may say, in the first place, that it is fortunately unnecessary as well as unusual for the bulk of them to live in the scalp and tomahawk atmosphere that distinguishes the sexual and social rivalry of Christine Fennimer and Nancy Almar, the two beautiful American Society dames whose duel for the affections of the eligible hero form the plot, the whole plot and nothing but the plot of Miss ALICE DUER MILLER’s latest book.  Nature red in tooth and claw has not mothered them—­they are too well-bred for that; they simply bite with their tongues. Mrs. Almar, who is married and purely piratical, comes off worst in the encounter, and the more artful Christine, ultimately falling in love with the object of her artifices, becomes human enough to marry him, despite his lapse from financial eligibility.  The plot is a thin one, but smoothly and brightly unfolded.  Unhappily Miss MILLER lacks the gift of delicate satire and the sense of humour that the society novel above all others seems to require.  With a lighter and less matter-of-fact treatment one would accept more easily the overdrawing of her rather impossible felines.

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