Lessons in Love

Katrina Trask's "Lessons in Love" is a volume of eight short stories that have appeared in the magazines from time to time, and all with a common motive suggested by the title of the volume. These dramas of the heart are created with a subtle and delicate touch, and they are markedly free from the morbid tendencies that are so apt to show in the work of writers of to-day who have appropriated the theme of man's love for woman.

Although the theme in each of these eight stories is different, the touch is the same; they all show similar vividness of feeling and imaginative intensity. Katrina Trask manages her climaxes with dexterity, "After a Year" being perhaps the best illustration of this quality. The thread of the story is slender ——it is merely an episode—but technically it is perhaps superior to the others. The story entitled “Beyond " is full of psycho-romantic beauty and "After All" is delicate and yet poignant. Beauty, both spiritual and physical, seems to have attractions for Mrs. Trask; she loves the luxury of life, yet-as she proves in this handful of stories — the unattained holds all, or most of, life's magic. In no small measure has Trask illumined the short story by a skillful and welcome fusion of romance and reality.