The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-08-27


 James tMitchell Kennerley, New over 300 pages of excitement and ad- venture. The heroine is enduring with complaisancy B marriage of affection, which seems. by the way as productive of disastrous consequences as the mar riage of convenience has long held the credit of being. Affection, not being absorbing. Mrs Enniscourt employs her leisure in social climbing. She has reached the height of an invitation to tea with a duchess and to help in the Horses Bazaar" which is that partic- ular duchess particular fad at the mo- ment-when, like the fly in the amber, the rift in the lute. the flaw in the dla- mond-appears the blackmailer. It Is not Mrs. Enniscourt who has to fear any divulgement of dark past, for hers has been a simple, narrow, uneventful middle class youth. Nor has her hus- band consciously committed any wrong for Arthur Enniscourt Is what the au- thor is pleased to call |" a rigidly good man. and rgidly good people compicate almost every situation in the world" The complication in this instance Is. the appearance of the alleged former wife of Arthur Enniscourt, declared many years ago dead and buried in California, while he was In New York, the alleged wife comes, neither feeling
 
 "on being kept and fed and clothed when 1t was her right to be provided with free garments, free lodging and free meals" These rights, inalienable from the holy estate of matrimony, Geraldine (called Enniscourt), agrees to supply to the alleged Mrs. Enniscourt if she herself be left to remain undis- turbed in the home of luxury; in the enjoyment of furs and jewels; In the prospect of presentation at court by Lady Bletchley; in short, in a position to hold "her bien coffee head at an in | solent angle while calmly and slowly surveying an assembly through gold and tortoise shell pince nez-for smirched regulations and pinde neg never accord" Even an adored and am I ply allowanced wife would no doubt | find it a strain to supply to another those inalienable rights, licensed by the | state and sanctioned by the church to
 marriage. free lodging, free clothing, free feeding" Geraldine (called Ennis court), found the strain trying to the utmost. First it drove her to gaming, cautiously and successfully, as she was | by nature a careful soul. Next to writ | ing the questionable books that win a host of readers.
 Upon this style of book the author comes forward in propria persona to com ment: Taking a stimulating pseudonym, and. beneath its protective cloak of dis gufse, write book with very strong purpose-the main purpose to earn large royalties by means of relating unsavory incidents dressed up in the transparent garments of pen-and-ink pointed morals. Let any novitiate in literature take the veil of hyprocracy, and his financial mis- sion is pretty sure to be acheived-hypro- cracy is the game which pays In litera- ture as well as in life.'
 In these efforts Geraldine is success ful even to her utmost desires But a dream realized is ever 8 dream lost-and no more desired. Geraldine has no soon CT succeeded in making secure her place respectable so far as the world could see," than there came quite suddenly into her life an air-man. a flight up to the clouds, "a kiss of the air. kiss of the skies," and with this new century. new science sort -a-kiss. came a love that lis hall-marked and genuine and has no use for cowardice." And with this love came a drop in the values of the | social climbers small successes and con ventional responsibility"
 Now the fact of the existence of a Mrs Enniscount, not herself, brought to her. self by the cunning blackmailer, became the key that was to bring her freedom. But when the key was fit to circum- stances. no door to freedom was opened, only a stream of light was let in by which Geraldine learned that the black | mailer had lied for her own ends and purposes, the usual sure course of that meanest class of criminals who trade up- | on the cowardice of the victim.
 Now it remained only to pay the price of folly. How that was paid and by
 whom ends a novel that has at least held interest unflaggingy. The debt run up by folly does not often include man. victim in its account, but this time the v,1t ao1l price alone.
 The double payment of folly's debt is startlingly novel, it is almost like alter ing the code of civilization, changing the writing in the book of fate tampering with the laws of the Medes and the Per sians. If this ultimate end to which the agitation of the Suffragette make, under the leadership of Mrs. Pankhurst and daughters, Sylvia. Adela and Christabel, why the world will not be for a portion of humanity the comfortable place 1t has been. However, it Is as yet only on the platform of quite new parties and in nov els like The Price," that these theories are to be found militant and rampant,
 "Fenellla," by 1T. L. Stuart
 The English are lavish writers. Here are plots for dozen best sellers as they fall from the parsimonious pens of authors on this side. More than any American does or Is permitted to do by our equally cautious and parsimoni- ous publishers the English give a sec tion of life, real life in a novel Life of many people doing many and varied things, crossing and meeting with very many other lives. in contradiction to the life of just two ardent lovers, or the triangle plot, both the main mat ter of our American novelists.
 The episode of the novel, Sad Com pany" the work of Paul Ingram, which went the rounds of the publishers only to be turned out ignominously before winning its final and lasting success. would be subject matter for a novel It. self of good accepted length, especial ly with the added episode of Althea Rees, her divorce and her annual novel that never strayed far from the pur- lieus and issues of Mayfair''--and her patronage of Paul. the fascinating un- successful one.
 Father Vernon, who had left the Eng fish church to revert to the ancestral faith" who lived on the east side. gaining sancity, but loosing polish. would make subject matter for anoth CT romance of the short and quick school. It was he who lead Althea Rees in the path she had chosen. When she, 1 too, found peace for her soul in the re- ligion of the Romanist. It was he who buried Althea with all the pomp and circumstances that the church of her adoption gives it's children as last assurance of It's own unshakeny power." It was he who gave to this very novel several pages of excellent epigrams | To any one at all familiar with the life | and death of the later writers of Eng