I cannot help regretting that Miss RHODA BROUGHTON has not thought fit to publish her total fictional tonnage (if without disrespect I may employ a metaphor of the moment) on the title-page of her latest volume. Certainly the tale of her output must by this time reach impressive dimensions. And the wonder is that _A Thorn in the Flesh_ (STANLEY PAUL) betrays absolutely no evidence of staleness. If the outlook here is a thought less romantic than in certain novels that drew sighs from my adolescent breast, this is a change inherent in the theme. For the matter of the present work is a study in conjugal tedium. _Parthenope_ (name of ill-omen) was one of those unhappy and devastating beings who go through life fated to bore their nearest and dearest to the verge of lunacy. So that her marriage to poor well-meaning _Willy Steele_ had not endured for more than a matter of weeks before the wretched man fled from his newly-made nest, with the heart-cry (uttered to _Parthenope's_ female relatives, themselves too sympathetic to resent it), "I cannot stand her any longer!" This unfortunate _debacle_ is very ingeniously contrasted with the courtship of another couple, immune from the curse; and the whole story is as fresh as it is amusing. Perhaps it might have been told in fewer words; at times the slender theme seems a trifle overladen. But probably your true Broughtonians (who must be reckoned in thousands) would condemn such a suggestion as heresy; and, if they be satisfied, as they certainly will be, then all is well. * * * * * It is a tribute at once to the art of her treatment and the actuality of her theme that, after reading the delicate little study of modern romance that ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL calls _The Lovers_ (HEINEMANN), I cannot determine whether the clever writer was reproducing or inventing--she begins so convincingly with the statement that it was her first chapter, itself an article in _The Century_, describing the life of The Lovers as she watched it from her window, that brought about her friendship with the originals, and thus her knowledge of their further history. Anyhow, true or not, it is the kind of story that has been going on all round us in these days of love and heroism. Mrs. PENNELL first began to watch her pair of _amoureux_ in their attic, which was overlooked from her higher window (most readers could probably make a shrewd guess at its postal district) in those seemingly so distant years when the young champions of artistic London used to meet at a certain _cafe_, wonderfully clad, to consume vast quantities of milk. Then came the War; the boy-husband enlisted, went to the Front--and the end is as we all have known it many and many times. In this little book the too familiar story is given with a restraint and absence of striving after effect that leave me, as I say, uncertain whether its appeal is due to art or actuality. But in either case Mrs. PENNELL has told it very well.