Defiance, pride, and patriotism in the high collar, tempered by regret in the soft ruche.... She would have been a problem and a poem; while I, in my cheerful reds, my dazzling white, my decisive short skirts, my piquant shoes, my audacious apron, am a conundrum, a pleasantry, an epigram." This would be very pretty on the stage, but a waiting-maid who calls herself an "epigram" passes our imagination under any other circumstances. In fact, Miss Howard seems to us to be altogether on a false tack in this novel,--to have utterly abandoned realism, and in its place to have imposed upon us scenes, characters, and actuating motives which have figured over and over again in book and play, and to which she has not succeeded in imparting any special vivacity or charm. The novel falls far below "Guenn," in which the author riveted and deepened the impression of her first clever little book, "One Summer." "Married for Fun." Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. The title of "Married for Fun," and the plot of the book itself, might easily suggest its being a screaming farce; and that may actually have been the intention of the author, although she is at times painfully serious. A young lady who, after going through a form of marriage to an utter stranger in a stupid charade, believes herself to be legally his wife, seems to be practically unfitted for the position of heroine in anything except a farce. But there is no fun in the book, and a whole series of absurd and incoherent incidents fail to produce any effect upon the reader save one of deadly ennui. The narrative, if such a host of incongruities and imbecilities can be called a narrative, is perpetually adorned by choice reflections of the author's own, and the itinerancy of an extended European tour is condensed and added to the other attractions. End of Project Gutenberg's Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885, by Various