None of your confounded subtleties and last cries in _Mrs. Latham's Extravagance_ (CHAPMAN AND HALL). An unvarnished tale, rather, fashioned according to the naïve method of simple enumeration and bald assertion, with such subsidiary trifles as characterisation left to the discretion and imaginative capacity of the reader. _Christopher Sheffield_, an artist, post-cubist brand, married his model, a dipsomaniac as it happened. Whereupon he implored _Katherine_ to share his life, which, to keep him from going down-hill, she very generously did, it being explicitly understood that she was to have the reversion of _Mrs. Sheffield's_ marriage lines. _Christopher_, however, becomes infatuated with the widow Latham--who had married a rich old gentleman for his money, while in love with _Lord Ronald Eckington_, then the penniless fourth son of a marquis, now the celebrated and well-paid photographer, "_Mr. Lestocq_"--so that when _Sheffield's_ model wife dies, he, instead of doing the right thing by _Katherine_, suggests settling the matter on a basis of five-hundred or (at a push) five-fifty a year. Naturally she draws herself up very cold and proud and refuses the compensation. And then, with a hardihood and success which nothing in this ingenuous narrative sufficiently explains, the _Honourable Lavinia Elliston_, _Lord Ronald_ and the extravagant _Mrs. Latham_ rush in to patch up the _Christopher-Katherine_ alliance. I don't suspect Mr. THOMAS COBB of thinking that people really do things quite like this, but probably he found that his characters took the bits between their teeth--as they well might. _Lord Ronald's_ share in the transaction seemed particularly gratuitous. I can only think that since moving in photographic circles he had discarded his high patrician polish in favour of a distinctly mat surface. He didn't marry the widow _Latham_ because he hated the thought of touching old man _Latham's_ money. She, discovering this, disposed of the whole of it in a few months of gloriously expensive living and giving. This, by the way, was her "Extravagance," which of course brought the happy ending. O, Mr. COBB! * * * * *