gerous implications of his own developing experience. Again, "I look at the mountains, I try to pray—and I think of something clever." But if anything more had been needed to deliver her into our hands we have but to listen to Mr Murry as he chants his pathetic and monotonous litany. In the September issue of The Adelphi with complete solemnity he quotes as a final solution of that mysterious secret which has baffled so many great minds—namely, "the essential of style"—Miss Mansfield's "simple and striking metaphor"—"to speak to the back of the room." One wonders just how Walter Pater would have received such a relaxed and domesticated formula.
Nowhere in The Dove's Nest do we find that "complex of fine measurements" commended by Henry James which distinguished Prelude, a story where each character gives out vibrantly yet driftingly without attenuation or discord its own separate note. Here are, indeed, many instances of her caressing insight, her own singular lightness of approach. Just as a child might imprison for a moment in the cup of its hand a fledgeling fallen by the wayside and then suddenly abandon it on some grassy plot, Miss Mansfield seems to clasp in the circle of her thought a passing protest over the crudeness of life, a sense of the fugitive unacknowledged differences that lurk between the sexes, a sympathetic understanding of adolescence, and then depositing her tremulous and explicit burden hurriedly on the ground, with a toss of the head, is off down the road whistling a bar from Bohême.
Perhaps the most interesting of the stories in this latest volume, although like most of the others, unfinished, is that entitled A Married Man's Story. Here, as in a much discussed earlier story, Je ne Parle pas Français, one detects in the composition a tranced tension combined with an underlying confusion of purpose, as though the mood that nurtured it, though fertile, though imaginative, had in the end served but to make glide stealthily through the pages Miss Mansfield's own lambent or perplexed observations. For Raoul Duquette, the little Frenchman in the former story, is neither mad enough, shallow enough, nor deep enough to be convincing, and the authentic ring in his suddenly enunciated misery, which his facile articulacy negates, announces itself unmistakably as a vicarious release for the author’s own private anguish, just as in A Married Man's Story she voices again her own insistent prob-
