ever to attain the routine indifference which makes work among such horrors possible.  Her deep religious convictions aggravated rather than eased that suffering.  She was honestly old-fashioned and never took quite kindly to the khaki-breeched free-spoken young women of the subsidiary war services, had a hatred of muddle and was a little severe on men, though acknowledging that “young men are the kindest members of the human race.”  True this, I should say, who am no longer young.  “The war is fine, fine, FINE, though I don’t get near the fineness except in the pages of Punch.”  Charming of her to say that.

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The heroine of Miss Fingal (BLACKWOOD) is called by her publishers “a woman whose distinguishing trait is femininity,” to which they add, with obvious truth, “a refreshing creation in these days.”  Really, in this one phrase Messrs. BLACKWOOD have covered the ground so comprehensively that I have little more to do than subscribe my signature.  To fill in details, Mrs. W.K.  CLIFFORD’S latest is a quietly sympathetic tale about a lonely gentlewoman (this you can take either as one or two words) rescued from a life of penury by the will of a rich uncle, transferred from her tiny flat in Battersea to Bedford Square and a country cottage, expanding in prosperity, and generally proving the old adage that where there’s a will there’s a way, indeed several ways, of spending the result agreeably.  As I have said, it is all the gentlest little comedy of happiness, not specially exciting perhaps.  I find it characteristic of Mrs. CLIFFORD’S method that the only at all violent incident, a railway smash, happens discreetly out of sight, and does no more than provide its victim with an enjoyable convalescence, and the attentive reader with the suggestion of a psychological problem that is both unnecessary and unconvincing.  The best of the tale is its picture of Miss Fingal herself, rescued from premature decay and gradually recovering her youth under the stimulus of new interests and opportunities.  Whether the now rather too familiar Kaiser-ex-machina solution was needed in order to rid the stage of a superfluous character is open to question; but at all events it leaves Miss Fingal happy in companionship and assured of the success that waits upon a satisfactory finish.

* * * * *

“How can I”—­I seem to hear the author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden communing with herself—­“how can I write a story, with all my necessary Teutonic ingredients in it, which shall be popular even during the War?” And then I seem to see the satisfaction with which she hit upon the solution of inventing pretty twin girls of seventeen, an age which permits remarks with a sting in them to be uttered apparently in innocence and yet is marriageable or, at any rate, engageable; making them orphans; giving them a German father and