with the domesticated fauna, to entitle his work _Our Dumb
Friends_. The book is divided in the main between adjuration and
prophecy. As a result of their emancipation from economic slavery, Mr.
BENNETT expects women--women, that is to say, of the "top class," as he
calls it--to adopt more and more the _role_ of professional
wage-earners; but at the same time he insists that they do not as yet
take themselves seriously enough as professional housekeepers. How the
two functions are to be combined it is a little difficult to see, but
apparently women are to retain a profession as a stand-by in case they
fail to marry or to remain married. At the same time Mr. BENNETT takes
it for granted that woman will never relinquish her position as a
charmer of man, or even the use of cosmetics and expensive lingerie.
Speaking neither as a novelist nor as a philosopher, I cannot help
feeling that Mr. BENNETT is too apt to consider the things he
particularly likes about women to be eternal, and those that he does not
like so much to be susceptible of alteration and improvement. Anyhow, it
looks as if Our Men were going to have rather a thin time.

* * * * *

Miss BEATRICE HARRADEN calls her latest story _Spring Shall Plant_
(HODDER AND STOUGHTON). She might equally well have called it _The
Successes of a Naughty Child_. Certainly it is chiefly concerned with
the many triumphant insubordinations of _Patuffa_ (whom I suspect of
having been encouraged by her too challenging name) both at home and at
the various schools from which she either ran away or was returned with
thanks. This is all mildly attractive if only from the vivacity of its
telling; but I confess to having felt a mild wonder whether a child's
book had not got on to my table by error--when the grown-ups suddenly
began to carry on in a way that placed all such doubts at rest. There
was, for example, a Russian lady, godmother of _Patuffa_, who escaped
from somewhere and established herself, with others of her kind, in an
attic in Coptic Street. My welcome for this interesting fugitive was to
some extent shaken by a realisation that she was (so to speak) a refugee
from the other side and, in a sense, a spiritual ancestress of
Bolshevism. Miss HARRADEN would however object, and justly, that the
clean-purposed conspirators of the earlier revolution had little in
common with the unsavoury individuals who at present obscure the Russian
dawn. Soon af