MARGARET DELAND'S well-proved pen gives us a spirited sketch of a modernist American woman in _The Rising Tide_ (MURRAY). I don't quite know how this enigmatic sentence, which 1 have long puzzled over and frankly given up, came to escape both author and reader: "Once Mrs. Childs said to tell Fred her Uncle William would say it was perfect nonsense." I feel sure it is not good American. However, _Freddy Payton_ is a young girl who tells the inconvenient truth to everybody about everything, and you may guess that such candour does not make for peace. _Mrs. Payton_ elects to keep her idiot son in the house, and _Freddy_ thinks an asylum is the proper place for him, and says so. The late _Mr. Payton_ was a rake, and _Freddy_ derides her mother's weeds on the ground that the widow is really in her heart waving flags for deliverance, but daren't admit it. _Freddy_ offers cigarettes to the curate, which is apparently a much greater crime over there than here. _Freddy_ finally, carried along by the rising tide, asks the man she loves to marry her, mistaking his friendship for something stronger, and learns that, as the old-fashioned people like her mother realise, men are essentially hunters and "won't bag the game if it perches on their fists." I wonder! But _Freddy_ got a better man--the diffident elderly man who was waiting round the corner. In fact, _Freddy_ is rather a sport, and if Mrs. DELAND intended her as a tract for the times, in the manner of Mrs. HUMPHRY WARD, her shot has miscarried--at least so far as I am concerned. * * * * * [Illustration: FORCE OF HABIT. HOW AN ESCAPED PRISONER OF WAR BETRAYED HIMSELF.] * * * * *