_Oliver_, the hero of _The Woman who Looked Back_ (STANLEY PAUL), seems to have been a person of exceptional credulity. Having as a boy married a quite undesirable foreigner, he subsequently went to India, and on his return accepted without question his mother's statement that he was a widower. So he married _Sara_, the heroine of the tale, and lived in great placidity for some eight years with her, till the expected happened, and the discovery of an old letter proved that wife No. 1 was very much alive. It is at this dramatic crisis that M. HAMILTON raises the curtain upon his (or her) story. If I treat it with flippancy it is not from any dislike of it; on the contrary it seems to me both interesting and human, especially human. The dialogue is profoundly and movingly natural; in every chapter I have felt that, given the postulated situation, the characters would talk exactly thus, which simply means that M. HAMILTON is an adept in her (or his) art. The situation is complicated by the fact that, though _Oliver_ had accepted his second marriage as an ideally happy one, _Sara_ in her secret heart was becoming monstrously bored. Indeed in a soft, play-with-fire fashion she believed herself in love with _Oliver's_ friend _George_, who himself adored her passionately. Naturally, therefore, when the bomb burst and _Sara_ was no longer the wife of anybody, _George_ thought his moment had come. I shall not carry the story of their three-cornered fight further. It remains three-cornered. Contrary to every accepted custom, the original and only genuine wife never once appears upon the stage. This strikes me as constituting a record in the avoidance of the _scène-à-faire_. Incidentally also it confirms me in my opinion of M. HAMILTON as an author of originality and honesty, whose picture of _Sara_ in particular shows that she understands a great deal about her own sex. * * *