e) in much of _The Pastor's
Wife_ (SMITH, ELDER) with its types of an East Prussian village drawn in
with those deft, half kindly, half malicious touches to which the
creatrix of _Elizabeth_ of the Garden has accustomed us. _Ingeborg_ is
the daughter of an English bishop--a bishop, by the way, so needlessly
odious that even those who would cheerfully believe the worst of the
order must protest against this hitting below the gaiters--and she meets
her pastor in a railway carriage on a cheap trip to Lucerne. This
so-utterly-by-the-pursuit-of-knowledge-dominated _Herr Dremmel_ (his
subject is scientific manure) has a lapse from the even paths of
research into the disturbing realms of love, and with an egotistic
single-mindedness which is beyond all praise overwhelms her into
marriage by the heroic process of ignoring all objections, refusals and
obstacles. And lo! in this manse of lonely Koekensee we have a problem!
_Elizabeth_, tongue in cheek, in the mask of IBSEN!... I couldn't get
myself to believe in the ineffable preoccupations of _Herr Dremmel_ that
made so desolate a pastor's wife; nor could I see the later enchanting
_Ingeborg_ in the little negligible mouse of the episcopal study (though
I liked them both); and, as I said, I entirely refused to accept the
bishop. But I heartily and thoroughly enjoyed the story, the happy
little strokes of humour and irony, the apt, pert thumbnail-sketches of
the subsidiary characters, the tender love of country things and moods;
and saw that I'd been an ass to take it all too seriously. It was
written to charm--and it's charming.

* * *

Laughter in these dark days is so wholesome a corrective that we mustn't
be too exacting with Mr. PHILLIPS OPPENHEIM, that fertile spinner of
yarns, when in _The Double Life of Mr. Alfred Burton_ (METHUEN) he
presents us with the diverting idea of a mean, little, loud, untruthful
auctioneer's clerk converted by the eating of a mysterious brown bean
into a paragon of candid truth, refined taste and romantic desire.
There's an amusing scene when _Burton's_ chief, a thoroughly resourceful
specimen of his tribe, cries down, under the same mysterious influence,
the pseudo-antiques he is selling, and so intrigues his old friends the
dealers that, with a curious _naivete_, they make absurdly high bids in
the belief that the auctioneer is up to some profitable little game.
_Mr. Alfred Burton_ himself becomes at a stroke a famous author just by
m