writing, is a collector of old furniture and china and a devotee of
driving, tennis and swimming. It is interesting that as a girl she studied
at the Royal Academy of Music with a view to being a professional singer.
Marriage diverted her from that, but she still retains her interest in
music; and it is characteristic of such novels as _The Splendid Folly_ and
_The Moon Out of Reach_ that a lyric appearing in the book embodies the
theme of the story. These lyrics of Mrs. Pedler's have mostly been set to
music.

What shall I say about Corra Harris's _The Eyes of Love_ except that it
offers such a study of marriage as only Mrs. Harris puts on paper? Shrewd
and homely wisdom, sympathetic and ironical humour, the insight and the
fundamental experience,--above all, imagination in experience--which made
their first deep and wide impression with the publication of _A Circuit
Rider's Wife_. I open _The Eyes of Love_ at random and come upon such a
passage as this, and then I don't wonder that men as well as women read
Corra Harris and continue to read her:

"Few women are ever related by marriage to the minds of their husbands.
These minds are foreign countries where they discover themselves to be
aliens, speaking another smaller language and practically incapable of
mastering the manners and customs of that place. This is sometimes the
man's fault, because his mind is not a fit place for a nice person like
his wife to dwell, but more frequently it is the wife's fault, who is not
willing to associate intimately with the hardships that inhabit the mind
of a busy man, who has no time to ornament that area with ideas pertaining
to the finer things. So it happens that both of them prefer this divorce,
the man because the woman gets in the way with her scruples and emotions
when he is about to do business without reference to either; the woman
because it is easier to keep on the domestic periphery of her husband,
where she thinks she knows him and is married to him because she knows
what foods he likes, and the people he prefers to have asked to dine when
she entertains, the chair that fits him, the large pillow or the small one
he wants for his tired old head at night, the place where the light must
be when he reads in the evening rather than talk to her, because there is
nothing to talk about, since she is only the wife of his bosom and not of
his head."

=vi=

Phyllis Bottome is just as interesting as her novels. When scarcel