Do you remember a clever, gloomy story that Mr. HUGH WALPOLE wrote, some years ago, about a pack of schoolmasters who got so monstrously upon one another’s nerves that the result was attempted murder?  I have just been reading a new story that may be regarded as the female counterpart of the same tragedy. Regiment of Women (HEINEMANN) is described as a first novel; and there are indeed signs of this in a certain verbosity and diffuseness of attack.  But it is at least equally clear that the writer, CLEMENCE DANE, has the root of the matter in her.  As in the book with which I have compared it, the setting of this is scholastic—­a girls’ school here, with all its restricted outlook, its small intrigues, and exaggerated friendships, mercilessly exposed.  You will be willing to admit that it is at least aptly named when I tell you that not till page 135 does so much as the shadow of a man appear, and then but fleetingly as the father of the poor child, Louise, the tragedy of whose death is the central incident of the book.  Naturally it can be nothing else than a painful story; in particular the figure of Clare, the adored teacher, whose cruel egoistical friendship, with its alternations of encouragement and brutality, first drives Louise to suicide, and all but wrecks the life of the young assistant-mistress, Alwynne, has in it something coldly sinister that haunts the memory.  But of its power there can be no question.  On one small point of psychology I am at issue with the writer.  I doubt whether the child Louise could have played Arthur in the school theatricals so marvellously as we are asked to believe without cheering herself, by such an artistic success, out of the temptation to suicide.  But the ways of morbidity are unsearchable, and this is no more than an expression of individual opinion.  It is not meant to qualify my admiration for the skill of this remarkable and arresting story.

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If the long postponement of the appearance of another novel—­Vesprie Towers (SMITH, ELDER)—­by the late Mr. THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON, means (I am careful not to say it does) that the author never intended it to see the light of day, honesty obliges one to admit that there may have been wisdom in that decision, for the story of Violet Vesprie, though touched with a certain charm and distinction, sadly lacks the imaginative intensity of Aylwin.  The plot is commonplace, being the familiar record of how the country seat of a once illustrious family nearly, but of course not quite, passed into the hands of strangers when the last of the race came to poverty.  Even the inevitable flight to London is not spared us or the heroine, and it is really only when the writer tires of his attempted conventionality that he comes more nearly to his own.  The return of Violet to her old home, for instance, is most fortunate in its failure to follow the rules, that