The Girls of St. Wode's. By Mrs. L. T. Meade.
(W. and F. Chambers.)—Mrs. Meade shows her readers, most of them, it is to be presumed, likely to be girls, one aspect of the new order of things, the career open to women. The poor mother who has been looking forward to the return of her girls from school is terribly disappointed to find how different is their outlook on life from hers. " Mamma," says one of them, "we decline to go into society, we decline to turn night into day, we decline to spend unnecessary money upon clothes." Then we have a not very attractive picture of the "ideal scholarly girl of the latter end of the nineteenth century." To us she seems somewhat of a caricature. To recommend that two of her companions should go to St. Wode's College because she had examined their "frontal developments" and found them satisfactory does not sound like real life. At p. 116 we are introduced to St. Wade's, and have the privilege of being present at a "cocoa-party," the feminine equivalent, it should be understood, of a wine. Before long a tragedy comes in,—Mrs. Meade cannot be content with- out a tragedy. A girl forges a friend's name to get a brother out of a scrape, and the friend takes the blame upon herself. That is what they do in romance-land. As we have said more than once, Mrs. Meade's plots are not her strong point ; but The Girls of St. Wode's is, nevertheless, eminently readable.
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