_Beauty and Bands_ (CONSTABLE) is not, as you might excusably suppose, a treatise on syncopation or the decline of Jazz, but takes its title from a verse in the Book of Proverbs. Really what the story most illustrates is the extent to which a clever and experienced writer can clothe a wildly impossible plot with some aspect of reality. Miss ELLEN THORNEYCROFT FOWLER assuredly does not lack courage; having thought out a "good situation" (which it certainly is) she was not going to be put off by any considerations of probability. I can't resist some sketch of it, even at the risk of spoiling your pleasure. Suppose a lovely but selfish wife, bored to the point of flight from a well-intentioned husband, then involved in a railway smash which disfigures her beauty, destroys her memory and incidentally reforms her character; let her by plausible circumstance be mistaken for another traveller in the wrecked train and under a new name and personality meet her husband, fall in love with him, but be compelled to reject his suit by the presumption that his vanished wife may still be living--as I hinted, the result in situations is enough to satisfy the most exacting, the only real drawback being that not all Miss FOWLER'S pleasantly persuasive efforts can make me believe a word of it. If she had dared a little more, and inflicted the husband with blindness, impaired hearing and slight mental decay, I would have stretched a point and supposed that, during a protracted courtship, he might never have recognised his own wife. Lacking these concessions I can only report an entertaining but preposterous absurdity. * * * * *