ling they must have murmured to themselves as they turned the absorbing
pages of _The Amazing Interlude_: 'How absurd!' It is doubtful if they
recalled the spoken misgiving at all."

Few novels of recent years have had so captivating a quality as had this
war story. But I wish to emphasise again what I felt and tried to express
at that time--the sense of Mrs. Rinehart's vitality as a writer of
fiction. In what seem to me to be her best books there is a freshness of
feeling I find astonishing. I felt it in _K_; I found it in _The Amazing
Interlude_; and I find it in her new novel just published, _The Breaking
Point_.

_The Breaking Point_ is the story of a man's past and his inability to
escape from it. If that were all, it might be a very commonplace subject
indeed. It is not all, nor half.

Dr. Richard Livingstone, just past thirty, is supposedly the nephew of Dr.
David Livingstone, with whom he lives and whose practice he shares in the
town of Haverly; but at the very outset of the novel, we have the fact
that--according to a casual visitor in Haverly--Dr. Livingstone's dead
brother had no son; was unmarried, anyway. And then it transpires that,
whatever may have been the past, Dr. Livingstone has walled it off from
the younger man's consciousness. The elder man has built up a powerful
secondary personality--secondary in the point of time only, for Richard
Livingstone is no longer aware of any other personality, nor scarcely of
any former existence. He does, indeed, have fugitive moments in which he
recalls with a painful and unsatisfactory vagueness some manner of life
that he once had a part in. But in his young manhood, in the pleasant
village where there is none who isn't his friend, deeply centred in his
work, stayed by the affection of Dr. Livingstone, these whispers of the
past are infrequent and untroubling.

The casual visitor's surprise and the undercurrent of talk which she
starts is the beginning of a rapid series of incidents which force the
problem of the past up to the threshold of Richard Livingstone's
consciousness. There would then be two ways of facing his difficulties,
and he takes the braver. Confronted with an increasingly difficult
situation, a situation sharpened by his love for Elizabeth Wheeler, and
her love for him, young Dr. Dick plays the man. The title of Mrs.
Rinehart's story comes from the psychological (and physical) fact that
there is in every man and woman a point at which Nature