insatiable appetite. Little concerts in half-warmed church rooms, little amateur theatricals and dances in the shabby Town Hall-anything to destroy the danger that lurks in unoccupied time. Restlessness demands an outlet, not in constructive action, nor in clear thinking, nor in real festivals or in the cultivation of growth; but solely in the destruction of time and the resuscitation of exhausting excitements." But the greatest excitement comes in unexpectedly. A certain William Vechantor, cousin to the Vechantors, takes over a grocer's shop in the town, and society is horrified, aghast. Louis Vechantor can't see why his family are so upset, and says so, whereupon his father turns on him with fierce comments about shallow democratic snobbery.

Louis is suddenly diverted from the problem about the cousin-grocers by being made the confidant of a weak young man called Eric Daunton, who has become engaged to an "impossible" girl. Louis advises him to marry her in spite of all opposition, and then does something himself which sets the wheel of fate in motion for him; he calls on his cousins and meets Dorothy, the grocer's daughter, completely different from the Beckwith girls, who were tough, and superficially emotional, who seemed to live for excitement and to make it for themselves out of nothing. He begins to ruminate over the curious anomalies in the other sex, the insensitive cruelty of Veronica Hughes, who could gloat over the agony of a bleeding bird. Dorothy was not at all Beckwithian: she was not devout, she took nothing on trust. He meets her by accident again one day in a train at London Bridge, and in spite of her rudeness to him manages to rouse her to talk, and recognises something real and vital about her that he could admire, as different

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as possible from Veronica. A spying gossip, by name Miss Lampe, sees Louis and Dorothy getting out of the train together, and spreads malicious rumours, and Louis is tackled by Veronica for going about with that common girl." Worse the customers of the Vechantors drop off, one by one. The gossip even reaches the ears of his father and mother, and he is told to cease from seeing any more of his cousins; he refuses and leaves home in consequence. He has an abortive interview with Veronica, and then Daunton comes to lament over his failure to cut loose from his traditions.

"In Beckwith they swaddle you all up, and you're bound to break out on the quiet; and then-no, they don't beat you, or shut you up; they cast you out. It's the punishment they're keen on. It satisfies their cruelty: Veronica, for instance, if she got hold of a man who'd cut all meetings in the dark, all the hysterical little smothered kisses and cowardly secrets, she'd very likely fall in love with him and be a woman." Dorothy meanwhile had fallen more and more in love with Louis now that he had cast off his fetters and left home. "It gave her life new significance, as though she had been groping blindly, without any clear aim. Ah, if Louis loved her even that did not matter, if she could only be important to him!" It was a beautiful time to her, in spite of the shop, in spite of the houses filled with unhappy and ill-disposed people which she passed each day. It was enough to live and love. As time passed she became fearful: no one seemed to have heard anything of Louis: Dorothy was in a panic lest he should be ill. Then came the night of the concert when she discovered that Veronica was also in love with Louis, and was betrayed by her emotion into calling Miss

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Lampe a venomous beast of a woman.' She then becomes maddened with jealousy, gets ill, only recovering on the reappearance of Louis. Ultimately they, of course, fall into each other's arms .. but it's Beckwith that we are mainly concerned with in this novel, not the love lyrics. "I've been thinking," says Dorothy, "whether perhaps Beckwith-that it isn't altogether a place at all. I mean, whether it isn't a sort of disease. If you live in London you hardly know your neighbours-you have your own friends. Nobody else cares twopence about you. But London isn't England. I've been wondering if, directly you go to England to live, you don't find Beckwith. Isn't Beckwith any small town in England? Isn't the choice between London-that's heartless-and Beckwith, where your life's everybody's business? Lovely Beckwith-poor-poor people-shut up in their houses and their shops, and never seeing outside-I think I hate stupidity worse than anything on earth, because it frightens me and crushes me." In order to press the moral home Mr Swinnerton favours us with an epilogue in the shape of a conversation between Miss Lampe and other typical Beckwithians after Louis and Dorothy had escaped from their toils. "While they were here I felt all the time that they were spoiling our little Cranford." Cranford! a community spending its time in a venomous search for the weakness of other people, watching, envying, scratching.

Μ'

V

STEPHEN MCKENNA

R MCKENNA leapt into fame with Sonia: it was no compliment to him. He had already written novels before this which apparently no one read, which were nearly as good as, if not better than, the one over which the public chose to rave. He is a born raconteur: but there is very little depth in him: most of his work scintillates with an obvious harshness: he indulges in epigrams: like Oscar Wilde he does not seem even to realise that there are any classes of society other than the aristocracy: his horizon is bounded by Half-Moon Street on the one side and Clarges Street on the other: he has a gift of wit which in Ninety-six Hours' Leave, a book that couldn't have taken more than ninety-six hours to write, is thoroughly adapted for readers of The Bystander and undergraduates generally. It is as well that there should be novelists who exactly suit convalescents. The authoress of Elizabeth and Her German Garden is one of the best of these: Stephen McKenna is another... I cannot think him a genius talented? yes. Admirable for reading in a train or when the brain is tired. And this is not to depreciate his value. There are very few really satisfactory novels which can hold our attention and yet not probe into the problems of life. You may say that in Midas and Son he has attacked a very grave problem, that of immense wealth and its dangers, but most of us would be willing to accept all the responsibilities of vast riches quite light-heartedly if any sportsman were to be forthcoming with the offer

of them. The problem of poverty as seen by George Gissing gives genius full scope, but genius regards the problem of Midas as quite a good joke. We thank God for Stephen McKenna because he occupies our very necessary hours of ease. It is so delightful to find that he knows his job. There are scarcely any people in his pages who are not titled: the joy of discovering that they do actually talk as titled people do talk-that is, like every one else above the local grocer is a very real one. Most novelists have a special vocabulary for dukes: they move stiffly in their presence: it is hard even for an Honourable to unbend. I like characters who make it a rule never to see suffering: for whom suffering and poverty do not exist. When the world is simply crowded with beautiful things to see, to hear, to smell, to touch, to taste, it is nothing but perverted ingenuity to go in search of squalor and pain and hunger: the only suffering I know is that which comes over me when I reflect on the transitory nature of it all, and between ourselves I don't let that distress me as much as an artist in life should." I feel drawn to people who keep engagement books of this sort: "April 30th, oysters go out of season; " who make epigrams like “Man cannot live by Aubrey Beardsley alone, at least not after he's five-and-twenty"; "To speak seriously argues an arrested temperament "; or the more sober statements of men like Lord Darlington, "You can't get a wife without working for her, and you can't work without a wife"; or the Oxford don "who used to say that the worst of bachelor parties was that you missed the exquisite moment when the ladies left the room.”

And having written so far I am troubled. I don't want to cross it all out because it is in some measure