ELLEN MELICENT COBDEN can certainly not be accused of writing too hurriedly. I don't know how many years it is since, as "MILES AMBER," she captured my admiration with that wonderful first novel, _Wistons_; and now here is her second, _Sylvia Saxon_ (UNWIN), only just appearing. I may say at once that it entirely confirms my impression that she is a writer of very real and original gifts. _Sylvia Saxon_ is not a pleasant book. It is hard, more than a little bitter, and deliberately unsympathetic in treatment. But it is grimly real. _Sylvia_ herself is a character that lives, and her mother, Rachel, almost eclipses her in this same quality of tragic vitality. The whole tale is a tragedy of empty and meaningless lives passed in an atmosphere of too much money and too little significance. The "society" of a Northern manufacturing plutocracy, the display and rivalry, the marriages between the enriched families, the absence of any standard except wealth--all these things are set down with the minute realism that must come, I am sure, of intimate personal knowledge. _Sylvia_ is the offspring of one such family, and mated to the decadent heir of another. Her tragedy is that too late she meets a man whom she supposes capable of giving her the fuller, more complete life for which she has always ignorantly yearned. Then there is _Anne_, the penniless girl, hired as a child to be a playfellow for _Sylvia_, who herself loves the same man, and dies when his dawning affection is ruthlessly swept away from her by the dominant personality of _Sylvia_. A tale, one might call it, of unhappy women; not made the less grim by the fact that the man for whom they fought is shown as wholly unworthy of such emotion. A powerful, disturbing and highly original story. * * * * *