_Shuttered Doors_ (LANE) is what you might call a third-and-fourth- generation story--one of those books, so rightly devastating to the skipper, in which the accidental turning of two pages together is quite liable to involve you with the great-grandchildren of the couple whose courtship you have been perusing. Observe that I was careful to say the "accidental" turning, though I can picture a type of reader who might soon be fluttering the pages of _Shuttered Doors_ in impatient handfuls. The fact is that Mrs. WILLIAM HICKS BEACH has here written what is less a novel than a treatise, tasteful, informed and sympathetic, on county life and manners and houses. The last of these themes especially has an undisguised fascination for her. When _Aletta_, the chief heroine, was left pots of money by a Dutch uncle (who was so far from filling his proverbial _role_ that he hardly talked at all) she spent it and her enthusiasm, indeed her existence, in restoring two variously dilapidated mansions--Graythorpes, her husband's home, and Doller Place, left her by an appreciative aunt. When not thus employed she would be reading a paper on Homes (given here _in extenso_), or comparing those of other persons with her own. I don't want you to get the impression that _Shuttered Doors_ is precisely arid; it is too full of ideas and vitalities for that; but it does undoubtedly demand a special kind of reader. Incidentally, Mrs. HICKS BEACH should revise her chronology. For _Aletta_, who was married at twenty-eight and died at sixty-two, to have had at that time a grandson on the staff of the Viceroy of India, he must have received his appointment before the age of fifteen--which even in these experimental days sounds a little premature. * * * * *