"To Ler'—Jolin Galsworthy, Heinemann, 1921, All confirmed novel readers if thay keep abreast with the latest efforts of our best known writers must now have a wide acquaintance with several interesting middle class families. The people may be a little shadowy, and we may never meet them in the flesh, although we are sometimes inclined to identify them with casual passers-by in the street and we have to wait for news of them until correspondents write the long interesting chatty letters that pass for novels to-day. Yet they do not die and get forgotten, or marry and never be heard of again, as did the old heroes and heroines of Dickens and Thackeray.
There are for instance those old friends of ours who used to live in the Potteries and have now removed to London. We are as interested to hear from Mr. Arnold Bennett that Edwin Clayhanger's granddaughter has a new baby as we should be if a similar event took place in the home of our wife's Then there are the Fanes that Compton Mackenzie introduced us to 12 years ago with that interesting young lady Sylvia Bcarlett. It is gratifying to hear how their circle of friends is widening, and with it ovrs. And the Trenchards that Hugh Walpole keeps us in touch with, a rather moony lot certainly, but it is pleasant to know that none of them have yet committed suicide. The Lawries still pop wp occasionally in our one-sided correspondence with Gilbert Cannan, but he isn't so thick with them now as he used to be, and they are getting rather shadowy, which brings us to the recent painful occurrences among our old friends the Forsytes. We are a little awed at the tribulations that have lately overtaken that superior family, who are the wealthiest and most important of our aeqnaintance. Tf it were not for his great reputation we should he inclined to suspect their chronicler, Mr. John Galsworthy, of piling it on a bit, so numerous and staggering are the backhanded blows that fate has lately been deuling them. All of which he has faithfully recorded in his last letter to their numerous friends entitled "To Let," just published by Heinemann.
Soames Forsyte, who lost his wife a long time ago through mistakenly regarding her as "property," and who divorced her when she took refuge with his cousin Jolyon, has "-1 a daughter by his second wife who was a Frenchwoman. As one might expect of one of Galsworthy's unfortunate friends she must meet and fall passionately in love with her father's divorced wife's son by her second husband. We tread confidently here for we know the ramifications of this family much better than we know—to her indignation—those of our wife's.
The consternation this disconcert-
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.