Because I have so great an admiration for their beneficent activities, I have always wanted to meet a novel with a lot about dentists in it, and now Miss DOROTHY M. RICHARDSON, in _The Tunnel_ (DUCKWORTH), has satisfied my desire. Dentists--a houseful of them--spittoons, revolving basins; patients going upstairs with sinking feelings; wondering at the pattern on the wallpaper; going down triumphant. Teeth. Appointment books. Dentists everywhere. This is not a quotation, but very like one, for Miss RICHARDSON affects the modern manner. Though one of the dentists is quite the most agreeable person in the book, he isn't the hero, because the author is much too clever to have anything of the sort. Her method, exploited some time ago in that remarkable book, _Pointed Roofs_, is to get right inside one _Miriam Henderson_ and keep on writing out her thoughts with as little explanation of her circumstances as possible, so that _The Tunnel_, to anyone who has missed the earlier books, must be very nearly unintelligible. Even the sincere admirer of Miss RICHARDSON'S talent will begin to wonder how many more books at the present rate of progress must be required to bring _Miriam_ to, say, threescore years and ten. My own belief is that if her creator is ever so ill-advised as to put her beneath a 'bus or drop her down a lift-well, she herself will be gone too; and for that I should be sorry, since I agree with almost all the nice things Miss MAY SINCLAIR says of the earlier books in an appreciation here reprinted from _The Egoist_. Miss RICHARDSON has evolved a way of writing a novel which somehow suggests the Futurist way of painting a picture; but _The Tunnel_ has left me wondering whether she has not carried her method a little too far. It seems to me that some of her heroine's thoughts were not worth recording; but perhaps when another four or five books have been added to _Miriam's_ life-history I may discover what the scheme may be that lies behind them all, and change my mind. * * * * *