le future--must soon be
decided by marriage, she is consumed with an intense and reckless desire
for new emotional experience. Her unrest is like that of the large class
of American women who are educated above the purely commercial standard
of their fathers and brothers, and are impelled to satisfy their
intellectual cravings by frequent European travel.

'This is only a state of half-existence,' said Honoria in reference to
her country life in Australia. 'Books are so unsatisfying! I read them
greedily at first, then throw them aside in disgust. They never take one
below the surface.... I want to grow and live.... What is the use of
living unless one can gauge one's capacity for sensation?' Gretta Reay,
in whom the same discontent is reproduced, exclaims: 'Ah, we Australians
are like birds shut up in a large cage--our lives are little and narrow,
for all that our home is so big.'

By these and other characters of the same type, the cultivated
Englishman, who offers them the prospect of change and emancipation from
monotony, is distinctly preferred in marriage to the man of colonial
birth and experience. 'Don't you know,' says Gretta to one of the
latter, 'that an Australian girl's first aim is to captivate an
Englishman of rank and be translated to a higher sphere--failing that,
to make the best of a rich squatter?'

The heroine of _Outlaw and Lawmaker_ differs from Gretta only in being
more emphatic in her preference for the doubtful stranger, and
irrational in her objections to her tried Australian lover, Frank
Hallett. Once, in a riding-party, 'she had moodily watched his
(Hallett's) square, determined bushman's back as he jogged along in
front of her, and compared it with Blake's easy, graceful, rather
rakish, bearing. Why was Frank so stolid, so good, so commonplace?'

A trifling superficial defect of the same sort turns the tables against
the gallant young explorer, Dyson Maddox, in his first suit for the hand
of Miss Longleat. The half-dozen analytical studies of female character
in the principal novels of Mrs. Praed are far from flattering to her
countrywomen, and might be somewhat misleading if we permitted ourselves
to forget that in every case it is only one phase of a colonial girl's
life that is being given.

The whims, the countless flirtations, the greed for new sensations, the
inconsistencies and the apparent mercenary attitude towards marriage,
are not more permanently characteristic of the women