This, the first novel, of a Southern woman, bears no mark of immaturity, feminine weakness, or sectional prejudice. The style is notably compact and finished, the handling strong and restrained, and the grasp of philosophic breadth and impartiality. Mrs. Hammond is something more than the clever woman who, in such numbers, is pervading the literature of the day—she is clearly a woman who can think closely and deeply, and her literary work has a real solidity of substance and significance. She has given us in “The Master-Word” a strong and original story, direct from her own thought, experience and observation, though it does not prove always humanly convincing or artistically satisfactory. “The Master-Word” is a problem novel in a double sense, for though the race question is the theme with which it is chiefly concerned, the sex question figures also in a subordinate way. Both problems are solved by the writer with the master-word, Love, not Law—Love that suffers, sacrifices, and conquers, not Law that judges, condemns and punishes. This idea is wrought out with psychical insight and vigorous reasoning, and as a thesis is eminently satisfactory, but the story which is the medium of its illustration does not always ring true, and moreover is weakest at the crucial points. Margaret, the young wife of Philip Lawton, a prosperous and aristocratic lawyer and farmer of Tennessee, discovers suddenly the fact of her husband’s criminal relations with a mulatto woman and his fatherhood of the latter’s child, a girl about the age of Margaret’s own daughter. She refuses to forgive and their estranged relations continue till he is stricken with pneumonia. At his deathbed the love she thought dead revives, and she forgives, as she realizes that the master-word is Love, not Law. This scene, by the way, is strongly reminiscent of the concluding chapter of “The Mettle of the Pasture,” where the dying husband delivers himself of his stagy and unnatural monologue.