Tue, Secoxo Wire-—By Lilian Ari Farpnton Butterworth. Lom There is a mystery in the life of Courtney Blake connected with his first wife, which drives him abroad for 10' years. He return fas sensitive as ever to the unin ly accusing finger which he sees in everyone he meets; and encount-Jers Alison Seymour in his brother's consulting room. He must be protected, she is of the type of woman that must have some one to pri tect. And so she becomes "The Second Wife." Naturally she runs up against the mystery, in which jan ex-maidservant of the former Mrs. Blake plays a large and vil-mous part, with the consequent misunderstanding, estrangement and and reconeilliation. The story. is. u little tong drawn out but the lot is well handled and the characterization vigorous. The women are, perhaps naturally, better than the men. Courtney Blake is a little strikes one as the sort of woman that some modern women are prone as the ideal of what self-reliant womanhood should be—a sort of female equivalent of the strong mut man once popular. One wishes did not find it necessary to her self-reliance to use a certain ndjective so freely and vigorously.
{etever thing: she has kept as near to his style as possible, so that we can taste, even through the medium of another language, his unequalled terseness, his curious austerity and his mastery of description alike.of people and places; Jand at the same time she has written excellent English. Even the best translations are occasionally, by sentences which without being 'a mere construe are none the les un-English. Miss Laurie's book iq singularly free from these. present writer happens not to have read this particular story of dg Maupassant's in the original but has read a great many others and Judging by them one would say that the reader of "A Life" in Engish will lose as little of the original as it would be possible for, any translation to lose, Whether will like the story is nother mate ter. Like Thomas Hardy, de Mau 7 passant was a relentless writer, He feonceives certain men and women and not by one hair's breath would hho interfere with their natural de-
[velopment and mutual reaction's to spare the reader's foi But fatter all one does not praise de Maupassant nowadays any more than one does other classics. It is odd to recall the days when he was so little understood in England as to be considered rather a "naughty"
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.