. The adventures of _Billy_ and _Saxon_, tramping it in
search of a home, soon make their urban terrors seem to them and the
reader a kind of nightmare. Here Mr. LONDON is at his delightful
best, and his word-pictures of country scenes are as fresh and fine
as anything he has yet done. _The Valley of the Moon_, in short,
is really two stories--one grim, one pleasant, and both brilliantly
successful.

* * * * *

It is perhaps a mistake to read a novel at a sitting, since the
reaction is too sudden and the reader is apt to find the real life and
the real people surrounding him highly unsatisfactory by contrast.
Mr. JAMES PROSPER has reduced me to this state by _The Mountain Apart_
(HEINEMANN), but it is my duty as critic to disregard my personal
feelings and judge impartially between the fictitious and the actual.
Duty, then, compels me to say that the _Mr. Henry Harding_ who at
the last solved all the difficulties of _Rose Hilton_ by the simple
expedient of a romantic proposal is a hollow fraud. The position
was this: _Rose_ was a woman of flesh and blood and all the human
limitations, blessed and cursed with all the intricacies allotted by
Providence to the sex. Her trouble was that she had to face life as it
is, and this she found very trying. She suffered from her marriage
to a man old enough to be her grandfather, and from her abortive
grapplings both with the abstract problems of her soul and the
concrete mischiefs of her female friends. The influence of IBSEN and a
militant Suffragette didn't help her meditations, and when her husband
died she had the mortification to find that the first man of her own
age who professed love to her was no man but a series of artistic
poses. Of her difficulties, real enough up to this point, the solution
was the fraudulent _Henry_, fraudulent because he was just a stage
hero whose actions and conversation resembled nothing on earth.
_Henry_, in fact, is the sort of person that doesn't exist, and, if he
did, would be intolerable to everybody except a novel reader worked up
to a climax. I doubt if even such a reader could stand the fellow on
a longer acquaintance. To this conclusion all must come in their saner
moments, and yet most will, I think, finish the book in one spell and
be under the delusion at the end of it that all their troubles
would be solved at once if only their friends would talk and conduct
themselves more like _Henry_.

*