Street, whom the Great Man had recently made Editor of Sparks and who realised that he was destined to be a titled millionaire, for is not that the authentic procedure?  Hence his fanatical obstinacy in wooing his, if you ask me, none too desirable bride.  I hope I am not doing the author a disservice in describing this as a thoroughly wholesome book, well on the side of the angels.  It has the air of flowing easily from a practised pen.  But nothing will induce me to believe that Mrs. Walbridge, putting off her Victorian airs, did win the prize competition with a novel in the modern manner.

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Mr. ALEXANDER MACFARLAN’S new story, The Inscrutable Lovers (HEINEMANN), is not the first to have what one may call Revolutionary Ireland for its background, but it is by all odds the most readable, possibly because it is not in any sense a political novel.  It is in characters rather than events that the author interests himself.  A highly refined, well-to-do and extremely picturesque Irish revolutionary, whom the author not very happily christens Count Kettle, has a daughter who secretly abhors romance and the high-falutin sentimentality that he and his circle mistake for patriotism.  To her father’s disgust she marries an apparently staid and practical young Scotch ship-owner, who at heart is a confirmed romantic.  The circumstances which lead to their marriage and the subsequent events which reveal to each the other’s true temperament provide the “plot” of The Inscrutable Lovers.  Though slender it is original and might lend itself either to farce or tragedy.  Mr. MACFARLAN’S attitude is pleasantly analytical.  It is indeed his delightful air of remote criticism, his restrained and epigrammatic style queerly suggestive of ROMAIN ROLAND in The Market Place, and his extremely clever portraiture, rather than any breadth or depth appertaining to the story itself, that entitle the author to a high place among the young novelists of to-day.  Mr. MACFARLAN—­is he by any chance the Rev. ALEXANDER MACFARLAN?—­may and doubtless will produce more formidable works of fiction in due course; he will scarcely write anything smoother, more sparing of the superfluous word or that offers a more perfect blend of sympathy and analysis.

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Susie (DUCKWORTH) is the story of a minx or an exposition of the eternal feminine according to the reader’s own convictions.  I am not sure—­and I suppose that places me among those who regard her heroine as the mere minx—­that the Hon. Mrs. DOWDALL has done well in expending so much cleverness in telling Susie’s story.  Certainly those who think of marriage as a high calling, for which the vocation is love, will be as much annoyed with her as was her cousin Lucy, the idealist, at once the most amusing and most pathetic figure in the book.  I am quite sure that Susies and