I
am left asking myself in bewilderment whether Mr. C.H. DUDLEY
WARD, D.S.O., M.C., can have been serious in the affair. As I say,
practically all the early characters are of little or no account,
including _Rhoda_ herself. Indeed, nobody looks like mattering at all,
and the whole tale has, to be frank, taken on a somewhat soporific
aspect, when lo! there enters a lady with a Russian name, no back to
her gown and green face-powder. If I said of this paragon that she
made the story bounce I should still do less than justice to her
amazing personality. Really, she was a herald of revolution, whose
remarkable method was to invite anyone important and obstructive to
her house and make them discontented. It was the work of half-an-hour.
Whether the process was hypnotic, or whether she actually put pepper
in the ice-pudding, I could not clearly make out. But the dreadful
fact remained that, let your patriotism be ever so firm, you had but
to accept one of green-powder's little dinners and next morning you
were as like as not to hurl a stone into 10, Downing Street. As for
the end--! But no, I will stop short of it.
* * * * *
Frankly, what pleased me most about _Affinities_ (HODDER AND
STOUGHTON) was its attractive get-up; pleasant, cherry-pie-coloured
boards, swathed in a very daintily-drawn pictorial wrapper, the whole,
as cataloguers say, forming an ideal birthday present for a young
lady, especially one at all apt to discover, however harmlessly, the
affinities that give these five tales their title.
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