_A Rich Man's Table_ (MILLS AND BOON) is one of those stories that I find slightly irritating, because they appear to lead nowhere. Perhaps this attitude is unreasonable, and mere fiction should be all that I have a right to look for. But in that case I confess to wishing a little more body to it. Miss ELLA MACMAHON's latest novel is somehow a little flat; not even the splintered infinitive on the first page could impart any real snap to it. The rich man was Mr. _Bentley Broke_, a pompous person, who had one child, a son of literary leanings named _Otho_. Perhaps I was intended to sympathise with _Otho_. It looked like it at first; but later, when he left home and married, without paternal blessing, the daughter of his father's great rival, he developed into such a fool--and objectionable at that--that I became uncertain on the matter. Especially as the pompous parent, lacking nerve to carry out a matrimonial venture on his own account, relented and behaved quite decently to the rebellious pair. So the rich man's table would have, as all tables should, more than one pair of legs under it again. Nothing very fresh or thrilling in all this, you may observe. But the characters, for what they are, live, and are drawn briskly enough. And there is some skill in the contrast between a dinner of herbs in Fulham, and a stalled ox, with fatted calf, at the rich man's table in Portman Square. Perhaps this is the point of the story. * * * * * So often have I read and admired the novels of "M. E. FRANCIS" that to praise her work has become a habit which it irks me to break. But I am now bound to say that _Penton's Captain_ (CHAPMAN AND HALL) has not added to my debt. And the cause of the trouble--as of so many other troubles--is the War. In her own line Mrs. _Blundell_ is inimitable, but here she is just one of a hundred or a thousand whose fiction seems trivial beside the facts of life and death. Apart from this defect, her story is absolutely without offence, a simple tale of love and misunderstandings and war and heroism, and the curtain falls upon a scene of complete happiness. Her only fault is that she has been tempted, excusably enough in these days of upheaval, to wander from her element, and I am looking forward to the day when she returns to it and I can again thank her with the old zest and sincerity. * * * * *