So long as "BERTA RUCK" will write for us such pretty books as _Sweethearts Unmet_ (HODDER AND STOUGHTON), we need never feel ourselves dependent on America for our supply of sugary novels. This home-grown variety is just as sweet, and really, I think, may be guaranteed not only harmless but positively beneficial. The authoress has evidently a tender pity for the young men and women whom our social conditions doom either to have no companions among their contemporaries or only the wrong ones. Her heroine represents the too-much-sheltered girl alone in an elderly circle, her hero the lonely young man who has no means of getting to know people of his own sort (I can't say class, because the authoress seems rather uncertain about that herself). Her story is written in alternate instalments by "the boy" and "the girl," a method which encourages intimacy in the telling as well as a sort of gushing attention to the reader not so pleasant. Miss NORA SCHLEGEL has drawn a pretty picture of _Julia_ and _Jack_ to adorn the wrapper, and I can assure everyone who cares to know it that they are just as nice as they look; _Jack's_ passion for abbreviation ("rhodos" for rhododendrons) being the only ground of quarrel I have with them or their creator. *** In _Passion_ (DUCKWORTH) Mr. SHAW DESMOND desperately wants to say something terrific about love, money and power. His violence makes one feel that one is reading under a shower of brickbats, and it is the effort of dodging these which perhaps distracts the mind from his message. (Is he a Marinettist, I wonder?) There are not enough words in the language for him, so he invents fresh ones at will; while as for grammar and syntax he passionately throttled them in Chapter I.; nor did they recover. I will own that notwithstanding all this the author has a way of making you read on to find out what it is all about. You don't find out; but there, life's like that, isn't it? The author's ideas of the operations of high finance are ingenuous. The _Mandrill_ (do I rightly guess this to be a portrait distorted from the life?), who is out to corner copper and "do down" the _Squid_ (head of the opposing copper group), is, if you are to judge by his passionate exuberance at board meetings, about as likely to corner the green cheese in the moon. I imagine the author saying, "_Mandrills_ mayn't be like that, but that's how I see 'em. It's my vision and mood that matter. Take it or leave it." Well, on the whole I should advise you to take it, first putting on a sort of mental tin hat. You'll at least have gathered that Mr. DESMOND is a lively writer. ***