name. The one they did not take climbed over the grey shoulder of the range, and the other brought them into an eastward valley, where there was for the moment no wind and a serenity that was surely perpetual. The cries of the hill-birds did but drill little holes in the clear hemisphere of silence that lay over this place. The slopes on either side, thickly covered with mats of heather and bristling mountain herbage, and yet lean and rocky, were like the furry sides of emaciated animals, and up above, bare black summits confronted the sky."
This is not a purple patch; everywhere the texture is close and of the same weight. But it is a little too thick, not fluid and easy enough. Reading it is like walking through breast-high corn: a delight at first, it inclines to become fatiguing.
The technique is particularly ingenious by which the events are presented through the consciousness of the different characters. We are shown them as they appear in turn to each other, so that they emerge in full, round relief; but they are not subjected to that detached, omniscient author's gaze which places too great a distance between the characters on the one side, and the author and reader on the other.
The next thing to say about the book is that it is in two parts. We are introduced at once to Ellen Melville, a very Scotch, delightful, earnest, funny, shrewd, simple, contemptuous, bright-haired, boyish, suffragette girl, who applies a strong sense of humour to herself, but lets none touch her political ideas. In the first part we are given her life with her mother in her penurious Edinburgh home, and in the office, where she works, with two disgusting lawyers, both very respectable, but with the makings, in the one, of a sadist, in the other, of a voyeur. (Miss West's opinion of the male sex is not high.) Then, with a d'Artagnanesque gesture, enter (from Rio) Richard Yaverland, tall, handsome, dark, rich, vital, with the masterful nature of an Ethel M. Dell hero, and a typically South American past, in which the torrid name of Mariquita de Rojas represents only one episode. He "doesn't care a damn for anybody or anything" but Ellen—and his mother. Soft music, and a dear, old, white-haired lady in the background? You little know your authoress, and if that is what you want, put the book down at the end of the first part, before learning more of the Mother and the
