The extraordinary cleverness of _A Woman's Man_ (HEINEMANN) is the thing which most impresses me about this life story of a French man of letters, at the height of his fame somewhere in the eighteen-nineties. He is made to tell his own story, and pitfalls for the author must have abounded in such a scheme, but Miss MARJORIE PATTERSON seems to have fallen into very few of them. _Armand de Vaucourt_ is a self-deceiving sensualist who justifies his amours as necessary to literary inspiration and neglects his wife only to find, too late, that she has been his guardian angel, her love the source of all that was worth while in his life and work. There have been such characters as _Armand_ in fiction who yet made some appeal to the reader's affection; it is the book's worst defect that _Armand_ makes none. His recurring despairs and passions grow tedious; his final but rather incomplete change of heart left me sceptical as to how long it would have lasted had the book carried his history any further. _Armand_ as a study of a certain type of egoist is supreme; my difficulty was that I had no desire to study him. Even _Maria-Therese Colbert_, the decadent wife of his publisher, a very monster among women, is more interesting. Miss PATTERSON is on the side of the angels, but she makes her way to them through some nasty mire, calling spades spades with a vigour which seems to have prevented her from paying much attention to some beautiful and hopeful things which also have everyday names. * * * * *