The same judgment applies with equal force to Mr. Lynch's talent. The difference between him and Mr. Swinnerton is that he has taken the trouble to make the best he can of his theme, which is exiguous and yet sufficient. The story turns on Jimmy Guise's gradual discovery of his wife's worthlessness; and the hasty reader might complain that in a short book Mr. Lynch has spent a great deal of time over a very small matter. But those who range through contemporary fiction, anxious to be hopeful, will be more interested in the care which he has spent on every facet of the tale. The device, by which Jimmy is at once presented, full length and in detail, to the reader, while Blanche is gradually discovered, is one of those solid and sufficient inventions which immediately command respect. The exact and measured discovery of her worthlessness takes place by slow, inexorable degrees which show that the author has never once relaxed his vigilance over his composition. There are, it is true, irrelevancies even in so short a work. Jessie Carruthers was not really necessary as a foil to Blanche. The "New Department," though it is deliciously sketched, takes too prominent a place. But these irrelevancies do not noticeably distort the general scheme, and are in fact probably the result of Mr. Lynch's unconscious recognition that his plot was a little too slender for even so brief a novel. But, in spite of this initial difficulty, _The Tender Conscience_ is a very creditable and satisfactory performance and gives grounds for looking forward with much interest to Mr. Lynch's future development. The novels of Mr. Gilbert Cannan and Mr. Stephen Hudson are of the sort in which an attempt is made to simulate distinction by gratuitous eccentricity. Some painters, in order to improve the landscapes with which nature has provided them, screw up their eyes until the scene before them runs into a confused blur. Mr. Cannan and Mr. Hudson make this grimace before the spectacle of life. It is a fashion like another, but it has less usefulness and, we imagine, less durability than the novel of adolescence.