_Narcissus_ (SECKER), by Miss VIOLA MEYNELL, is one of those books for which I cannot help feeling that my appreciation would have been keener two years ago than is possible to-day. It is the story of the growth to manhood of two brothers, _Victor_ and _Jimmy_, who live with their widowed mother in an outer suburb of London. That there is art, very subtle and delicate art, in the telling of it goes without saying. The characters of the brothers are realized with exquisite care. _Victor_, the elder, uncertain, violently sensitive and emotional, seeking always from life what he is never destined (at least so far as the present story carries him) to attain; _Jimmy_, placid, shallow, avoiding all emotion, attracting happiness like a magnet. Nothing, I repeat, could be better done in its kind than the pictures of these two, and of the not very interesting crowd of young persons among whom they move. But, for all its real beauty of style, I have to confess that the book left me cold, and even a little irritated. Perhaps we demand something more from our heroes these days than susceptibility, or indifference, to emotion. Was the purpose of life, one wonders, ever as delicately elusive as these bewildered young men seem to find it? I kept longing for Lord DERBY. Perhaps, again, this is but part of the cleverness of the writer, and Miss MEYNELL, like the child in the poem, only does it to annoy. But I hardly think so. Her tenderness and sympathy for _Victor_ especially are obvious. He, I take it, is _Narcissus_ (though _Narcissi_ would have been a truer title for the book, as each of the brothers is more in love with his own reflection than with anything else), and, since he is left unmarried at the close of the volume, I derived some quiet satisfaction from the thought that modified conscription might yet make a man of him. * * * * *