I wonder whether Evelyn Braxscombe Petter just decided that her novel could not be up to date without a German spy and so forth, or whether she really set out to do her bit for the War by commenting on the Teutonic idea of honour. Anyhow, one must admit that her Gretchen Meyer is drawn with rather uncommon skill, even if her subterranean mental processes are never exactly elucidated in Miss Velanty's Disclosure (Chapman and Hall). Though educated in England and dependent, to their misfortune, on English friends for maintenance, there always lurked in Gretchen's attitude of impartial selfishness a certain muffled hostility to the ways of this country, and particularly to an objectionable habit she found in us of placing an exaggerated value on straightforward dealing. This culminated in a quite gratuitous, and indeed even insane, demand on the man who for his sins was in love with her that he should surrender either his English ideal or her. That he did as wisely as honestly in letting her go and be d——d to her, I for one had no doubt, nor I think had the authoress, for, although she could never quite forget that Gretchen was her heroine, endowing her with a kind of beauty and even baldly labelling her attractive, it is really, on the whole, a designedly repulsive person she has presented to us. Though an interesting study in Teuton perfidy and certainly better written than the columns of most evening papers, I can hardly recommend the book as a restful change from that class of literature.
Mr. H. B. Marriott Watson has invented a gentleman of the road, Dick Ryder, of whom his publishers, Methuen, confess themselves very proud in that nice way they have. Armed with a bodkin and a barker he rushes and tushes his way through life, slitting weasands and dubbing every cully he meets a muckworm in the pleasant idiom current (so I take it on faith) in the time of our second James. I should have been more impressed with this hero's feats in the first few tales of As it Chanced if they had been in the very faintest degree plausible. Never surely were such preposterous fights, in which the whole action of a score of desperate opponents is completely suspended while the redoubtable one brings off his splendid stunts. I gratefully remember once having been helped through a dull day by The House on the Downs. Unless memory gilds my judgment the author put some reasonable amount of invention into that. But these collected tales are rather indifferent pot-boiling if you are to take any other standard but that of the gallery's formula for yarns of adventure. Perhaps, "as it chanced," my war lunch did not agree with me. But anyway I really cannot quite honestly commend this volume to any but the most stalwart of Mr. Marriott Watson's many loyal friends.