administration work in Penang and district, where on the evidence he seems to have kept his end up with skill and no small zeal for good government. * * * The title of Lady (LAURA) TROUBRIDGE'S new novel, _O Perfect Love_ (METHUEN), applies to her V. C. hero only; with his wife it is a case of O Very Imperfect Love. _Jean Chartres_ is a common product of the age, the sort of girl that insists on "having a good time" and "living her life" and "being herself" (how well one knows the jargon!). Less common, let us hope, is the woman who would desert her husband, as _Jean_ did, because the injuries he had received in the War prevented him from giving her the kind of life for which she craved. Foolish rather than vicious, she drifts into a relationship which could have had only one conclusion, if her lover, tiring of platonics, had not prematurely pressed his demands. Thoroughly scared by his violence she runs away and finds sanctuary with the "perfect love" of the title. In this happy solution she had better fortune than she deserved. It is not every woman who has the good luck, when rushing blindly out of the House of Peril into the wintry night (in a ball-dress), to find--what had apparently escaped _Jean's_ memory for the moment--that her faithful husband's estate is in the immediate neighbourhood. Though Lady TROUBRIDGE'S sense of style is not impeccable she can tell a good tale; her dialogue rings true and her characters are well observed. The trouble with most authors of Society novels is that either they know their subject but can't write, or that they can write but know nothing of their subject. Lady TROUBRIDGE is one of the very few writers in this kind who both know their world and how to portray it. * * *