There is certainly this to be said of Mr. HUGH WALPOLE--that, having devised a tale of gloom, he allows no weak consideration for his readers' feelings to deter him from making the worst of it. I write, having but now emerged, blinking a little at the familiar sunlight (yet oddly invigorated too), from a perusal of the four-hundred-and-seventy pages of his _Captives_ (MACMILLAN). Of course I have nothing like space to detail for you its plot. Summarised, it tells the life of a young woman, _Maggie Cardinal_, whom one may briefly call the bemused victim of religions--and relations. You never knew any well-intentioned heroine who had such abysmal luck with both. Her clergyman father, a bad hat, who spared us his acquaintance by expiring on the first page; her semi-moribund aunts in their detestable London home; the circle of the Inner Saints, with their intrigues that centred in the ugly little meeting-house; the seaside parish with its spiritually-dead atmosphere, in which _Maggie's_ hopeless married life is spent--all these and more are realised with an art that is almost devastating in its unforced effect. Sometimes I hoped that such universal drabness was too bad to be true; one caught touches of manipulation, times in which these poor _Captives_ seemed bound less by the chains of circumstance than by the wires of Mr. WALPOLE. The queer result was that I found myself believing in his compellingly human characters, but protesting that such unbroken misfortune could not, or need not, have encompassed them. To take an example, when _Maggie's_ "tipsy" uncle was shown into the Vicarage drawing-room on her "At Home day," no other guests had yet arrived. Surely therefore (save for peremptory orders from Mr. WALPOLE) she might somehow have removed the culprit to another room, or at least denied herself to subsequent callers, who included (of course) the most influential and scandal-mongering of the parish ladies. That is the kind of rather piled-up agony that made me suspect Mr. WALPOLE of letting his fortitude get at times the better of his commonsense. But he has written a big book. * * * * *