Power shows in every line of the story. Power of a silent but incomparably wonderful sort is embodied in Jennie Cushing, the girl whose infancy was spent in a brothel, who learned completely and finally when to keep her lips shut, who was sent to a reformatory, who went to work as a domestic on a farm, who gave herself to be the model and mistress of an artist, who gave nothing that was not hers to give, whose only mistake was in keeping silent once too often--or _was_ that a mistake? At any rate, Jennie Cushing was stronger than any one about her, more human, broader, capable of greater comprehensions, readier to make necessary decisions and to act upon them, able to pay the hardest price the world could exact from her--cool, courageous Jennie! And yet she was feminine. Who can forget the little girl that was stricken with the loveliness of the bronze statuette of two girls blithely dancing? But her clear insight! She knew that it would be wrong for Don to marry her and, in the very torture of her love for him, had courage to tell him so and insist upon it. Her love she could not deny, or would not; one hesitates to say that Jennie _could not_ deny herself anything. _The Boardman Family_ suffers one serious defect. After writing with all her usual skill and putting completely before us the girl Sandra Boardman; her contemptible brother; Max Levison, the theatrical manager; and various other absolutely life-like and interesting persons; after getting our interest to a high pitch in the dilemma that confronts Sandra respecting Levison as a lover Mrs. Watts quite incomprehensibly has these three take passage on the Lusitania (they could as easily have sailed on any other boat) and in the destruction of the steamship Levison and Everett are drowned! The reader has himself the sense of being submarined; his interest, torpedoed without warning, sinks without a trace. If such a thing took place in a novel by a less able writer we should know what to think of it; we should know that the author had created a situation which was beyond him and from which he could not extricate his people without a few fatalities! But no situation is beyond Mrs. Watts; she has proved that time and again. It is a mystery to be cleared up later. _Van Cleve_ is an excellent and characteristic piece of work which, next to _Nathan Burke_, may perhaps best be depended upon to engage the interest of any one whose natural or acquired tastes fit him to enjoy Mrs. Watts’s fine novels of the manners of our time. Of her _Three Short Plays_, since they are not really within the scope of this book, we will say merely that _An Ancient Dance_ is the most ingenious and dramatically effective. _Civilization_ is splendid satire but inconclusive in its termination. _The Wearin’ O’ The Green_ is a farce that lacks the necessary madness and fantasticality. But all three plays are most agreeable reading. BOOKS BY MARY S. WATTS