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388 other more agreeable persons. You will own that this is at least a propos. The whole thing is, of course, quite charmingly told. All the characters are thoroughly alive; most of all perhaps the placid, tolerant and entirely practical mother of the heroine. Persis Fennamy had been introduced to the genius as a suitable disciple and possible helpmate by the Signorina Zardo, who worshipped him from afar. Persis met Ludwig, was interested, impressed and even willing to admire. There were two other men also, attendant upon the great one: Conrad Sacks, who was gentle and deformed, and Graf von Ludenstein, who represented another type of German manhood. He repre-sented it so well, indeed, that, when Mrs. Fennany discoveredt hat he had taken Persis off for an intimate conversation in a wood, even her tolerant placidity was deranged. But it was all right, and Persis escapes heart-whole from the lot of them, clay superman and all. She is to be congratulated. So is the author, for her book is both apt to the moment and interesting in itself.

There is, for all its gaiety, a certain external quality of pathos (now that the German is to us so sinister a figure) in much of The Pastor's Wife, With its types of an East Prussian village drawn in with those deft, half kindly, half malicious touches to which the creatrix of Elizabeth of the Garden has accustomed us. Ingeborg is the daughter of an English bishop—a bishop, by the way, so needlessly odious that even those who would cheerfully believe the worst of the order must protest against this hitting below the gaiters—and she meets her pastor in a railway carriage on a cheap trip to Lucerne. This so-utterly-by-the-pursuit-of-knowledge-dominated Herr Dremmel (his subject is scientific manure) has a lapse from the even paths of research into the disturbing realms of love, and with an egotistic single-mindedness which is beyond all praise overwhelms her into marriage by the heroic process of ignoring all objections, refusals and obstacles. And lo! in this manse of lonely Kokensee we have a problem! Elizabeth, tongue in cheek, in the mask of !... I couldn't get myself to believe in the effable preoccupations of Herr Dremmel that made sa desolate a pastor's wife; nor could I see the later enchanting Ingeborg in the little negligible mouse of the episcopal study (though I liked them both); and, as I said, I entirely refused to accept the bishop. But I heartily and thoroughly enjoyed the story, the happy little strokes of humour and irony, the apt, pert thumbnail-sketches of the subsidiary characters, the tender love of country things and moods; and saw that I'd been an ass to take it all too seriously. It was written to charm—and it's charming.

Laughter in these dark days is so wholesome a corrective that we mustn't be too exacting with Mr. Author:Phillips Oppenheim, that fertile spinner of yarns, when in The Double Life of Mr. Alfred Burton he presents us with the diverting idea of a mean, little, loud, untruthful auctioneer's clerk converted by the eating of a mysterious brown bean into a paragon of candid truth, refined taste and romantic desire. There's an amusing scene when Burton's chief, a thoroughly resourceful specimen of his tribe, cries down, under the same mysterious influence, the pseudo-antiques he is selling, and so intrigues his old friends the dealers that, with a curious naïveté, they make absurdly high bids in the belief that the auctioneer is up to some profitable little game. Mr. Alfred Burton himself becomes at a stroke a famous author just by merely writing what he sees and seeing true. (But wouldn't his readers also need a nibble at the bean?) Finally falling from grace as the effect of this food of the gods wears off, he accepts a directorship of the new mind-food company, "Menatogen," which brings him untold wealth. Quite innocent fooling which yet leaves one with the impression that our popular authors let themselves off rather lightly from the labour of working out their themes.

