Anthony Graeme. By Edith Gray Wheelwright. (Bentley.) — This looks
like an experiment in fiction, and not inappro- priately it deals with an experiment in life. Anthony Graeme, an Oxford Professor of Moral Philosophy, who is absorbed in his subject, and—all unconsciously—in himself, marries a mere girl, Rachel Forrester. He is kindly, considerate after a fashion, but devoid of passion—there was passion in him at one time, but a love-affair he had in his youth having ended badly, it died out of him—and not sympathetic in the true sense. But the experiment fails. The two drift apart. Finally, they quarrel over what she believes to be an act of cold-blooded sel- fishness on his part. In a paroxysm of rage she burns what she believes to be his precious manuscripts. He cries to her " Go !" She goes, and seeks to live an independent life in London. On the advice of his friend Merwyn, however, Gramme seeks her and takes her back. They are beginning to live more happily than they did before, when death claims Rachel. Thereupon Graeme commits suicide. This is a painful ending to an un- satisfactory story, which appears to prove nothing but that a girl of two-and-twenty ought not to marry a man of fifty. Anthony is a careful sketch of a prig; but a still better portrait is Robert Merwyn,—a really admirable spcimen of the don who is more, at all events at heart, a man of the world than a man of the cloister.
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