Mr. James Hilton is very young and very clever. If, as he grows older, he learns to be clever about more interesting things he ought to write some very good novels. Catherine Herself (Unwin) has red hair, but then she has a rather more red-haired disposition than most red-haired heroines have to justify it, so this is not my real objection to the book. My quarrel is that, though I cannot call it an ugly story without giving a false impression, it is certainly a quite unbeautiful one, and at the end of its three hundred and more pages it has achieved nothing but a full-length portrait of an utterly selfish woman. Mr. Hilton has dissected her most brilliantly; but I don't think she is worth it. Catherines, whether they marry or are given in marriage, or do anything else, are really stationary; and, since the persons of a story, if it is to be worth telling, must move in some direction, Mr. Hilton will be well advised in future to choose a different type of heroine. I want to say too that I don't believe that it is either so easy or so profitable to become a well-known pianist "not in the front rank" as he seems to imagine it is. I wish I could think that no one else would believe him.
Knight (to his henchman). "Everything all right, Perkins? You haven't forgotten anything? What's that?"
Henchman. "It's the portrait of your lady, Sir, that you promised to take into battle with you, Sir."
Knight. "Did I? Well, I must e'en keep my word. Fasten it on my back. One never knows—it may be useful in case of a reverse."
It seems rather a bright idea of C. Nina Boyle to dedicate "to Thea and Irene, whose lives have lain in sheltered ways," a seven-shilling shocker about ways that are anything but sheltered. Perhaps the sheltered in general, and Thea and Irene in particular, will take it from me that the villainies of Out of the Frying Pan are much larger than life or, at any rate, much more concentrated, and that pseudo-orphans like Maisie usually have a better chance of getting out of frying-pans into something cool than the author allows her heroine. I also submit that there was nothing in Maisie's equipment to suggest that she would have been quite so slow in separating goats from sheep. But let me say that Thea and Irene have had dedicated to them an exciting and amusing fritto misto of crooks, demi-mondaines, blackmailers, gamblers, roués, murderers, receivers and decent congenital idiots of all sorts. The characterisation is adroitly done and the workmanship avoids that slovenliness which makes nineteen out of twenty books of this kind a weariness of spirit to the perceptive. I wonder if Maisie with such a father and mother would have been such a darling. Perhaps Professor Karl Pearson will explain.