you head over ears into such tearing melodrama as is comparable only to Episode 42 of “The Adventures of the Blinking Eye” at a provincial cinema.  I am left asking myself in bewilderment whether Mr. C.H.  DUDLEY WARD, D.S.O., M.C., can have been serious in the affair.  As I say, practically all the early characters are of little or no account, including Rhoda herself.  Indeed, nobody looks like mattering at all, and the whole tale has, to be frank, taken on a somewhat soporific aspect, when lo! there enters a lady with a Russian name, no back to her gown and green face-powder.  If I said of this paragon that she made the story bounce I should still do less than justice to her amazing personality.  Really, she was a herald of revolution, whose remarkable method was to invite anyone important and obstructive to her house and make them discontented.  It was the work of half-an-hour.  Whether the process was hypnotic, or whether she actually put pepper in the ice-pudding, I could not clearly make out.  But the dreadful fact remained that, let your patriotism be ever so firm, you had but to accept one of green-powder’s little dinners and next morning you were as like as not to hurl a stone into 10, Downing Street.  As for the end—!  But no, I will stop short of it.

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Frankly, what pleased me most about Affinities (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) was its attractive get-up; pleasant, cherry-pie-coloured boards, swathed in a very daintily-drawn pictorial wrapper, the whole, as cataloguers say, forming an ideal birthday present for a young lady, especially one at all apt to discover, however harmlessly, the affinities that give these five tales their title.  As for the stories themselves, really all that need be said is to congratulate Mrs. MARY ROBERTS RINEHART on the ingenuity with which she can tell what seems an obvious intrigue yet keep a surprise in reserve.  I suppose it is because they come to us from America that certain of the episodes turn upon incidents in the Suffrage struggle, tale-fodder that our own militant novelists have long happily discarded.  Of the others I think I myself would award the palm to one called “The Family Friend,” a genially cynical little comedy of encouraged courtship, of which the end seems to be visible from the beginning, but isn’t.  Altogether, what I might call a Canute; in other words a book for the deck-chair, not too absorbing to endanger your shoes, however close you read it to the advancing wave.

* * * * *

I think I should best describe the characteristic quality of Four Blind Mice (LANE) as geniality.  The scene of it is Burmah—­astonishing, when you consider the host of novels about the rest of India, that so few should employ this equally picturesque setting—­and it is quickly apparent that what Mr. C.C.  LOWIS doesn’t know at first hand about Rangoon is not likely to be missed.  The tale itself is a good-humoured little comedy of