Mr. COSMO HAMILTON lays the scene of His Friend and His Wife (HURST AND BLACKETT) in the Quaker Hill Colony of Connecticut, the members of which were typically “nice” and took themselves very seriously.  So when one of them brought a divorce suit against her husband there was a feeling that the colony’s reputation had been irremediably besmirched.  Mr. HAMILTON can be trusted to create tense situations out of the indiscretions of an erring couple, but he also contrives, in spite of its artificial atmosphere, to make us believe in this society, though he tried me rather hard with a scandalmongress of the type we happily meet less often in life than in fiction.  I hope he will not be quite so dental in his next book.  I didn’t so much mind Mrs. Hopper’s teeth, which “flashed like an electric advertisement,” but when he made two golfers also flash “triumphant teeth” I recoiled.

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The Golden Bird of Miss DOROTHY EASTON (HEINEMANN) is indeed lucky to set out on its flight with a favouring pat from Mr. JOHN GALSWORTHY.  He asserts that these short studies of people and things in England and France are very well done indeed; that moreover, though the short sketch may look, and the bad short sketch may be, one of the easiest of literary feats, the good short sketch is in fact one of the most difficult.  Now who should know this if not Mr. GALSWORTHY, and who am I that I should presume to disagree?  As a matter of fact I don’t.  Quite the contrary.  But naturally I shall get no credit for that.  I will only add that Miss EASTON has not a majority mind, that she sees the sad thing more easily than the gay, that I like her work best in her more objective moods, and that, like so many writers of perception, she finds the quintessence of England’s beauty in happy Sussex.

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[Illustration:  IN OLD VERSAILLES.

Mother. “GOOD NEWS, MY SON!  EVEN AS I PONDERED WHETHER I SHOULD EAT OUR LAST CRUST THE EVER-KIND ABBE CALLED TO SAY HE HAD FOUND THEE A HIGHLY-PAID APPOINTMENT AT COURT.”

Son. “YES—­BUT DID HE TELL YOU IT WAS AS FOOD-TASTER TO HIS MAJESTY, WHO DAILY EXPECTS TO BE POISONED?”]