After finishing Rupert Hughes's new novel, Souls for Sale, the reader has not only completed a trip to Hollywood and found out the true conditions there, but has met, on intimate terms, the stars and lesser lights of the motion-picture world, the directors and producers, and even those precocious children who present their mothers with motor cars from one week's salary. They are real people henceforth to the reader, and when he watches his favorite star upon the screen he will have "inside" information as to what she has encountered in succeeding in her career; he will know how that storm scene was "shot," and he will have an insight into the private life of the average motion-picture actor.

For Rupert Hughes passes a great part of his time at the motion-picture studios of Los Angeles. His novel is perhaps the first of its kind written so far by one who knows whereof he speaks. It is by no means propaganda, either for or against the "movies," but an honest statement of Hollywood studio life.

There are a number of personalities in Souls for Sale which are based upon real people. Many of these are named. But, above all, Mr. Hughes has told a good story.

He tells about Remember Steddon, the daughter of a bigoted small-town clergyman, who loves too well a young man who is killed in an accident before he can marry her; about her old family physician, a hopeless movie fan, who concocts a scenariolike scheme to save her from disgrace; about her subsequent trip West for her health; about the chance which threw her into the most public profession in the world so that she could lose herself.

To divulge the different forms in which love and adventure come to Remember

would be to spoil the story. So permit me to quote from a characteristically informing paragraph:

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In a heat that drove the desert Indians into the shade and idleness, these dainty actresses and actors invited sunstroke and labored with muscles and emotions at full blast in order to make pictures and minimize the appalling overhead expense of every wasted hour.

. . . To Mem it was all incredible phantasmagory. She could not believe that this was she who stumbled across the sand, twitching her skirts out of the talons of the cactuses, carefully dabbing the sweat from her face with a handkerchief already colored like a painter's brush rag, and jingling, as she walked, with barbaric jewelry. . .

"The director massed the extras together and addressed them from his horse:

"Ladies and gentlemen, you are supposed to be an Arabian tribe driven from your homes by the cruel enemy. You are wandering across the desert without food or water, dying of hunger and thirst. Later in the afternoon, if we can reach it, you will be overtaken by a sandstorm and many of you will perish miserably. It's hard work, I know, but if you will go to it we'll be out of this hell hole to-morrow and there will be more comfortable work in the cool night shots. So make it snappy, folks, and do what you are told on cue, with all the pep you can put into it. I thank you!""

Again, a scene in which Remember is "tested" to see if she will screen:

"Claymore took up a heap of tarpaulin and piled it on a chair to represent a man, found a screw-driver left on the scene by a carpenter, and gave it to Mem for a pistol. Then he outlined a scenario startling and bewildering to her, and utterly uncongenial to her character and experience:

"This tarpaulin is a terrible villain. He has decoyed you from your home and tired of you; he has put you on the street and made a drug fiend of you, and now you have

seen him with another girl, and you plead with him not to desert you; he laughs at you; you turn on him like a tigress and, when he goes on laughing, you creep up on him with a false smile and suddenly shoot him with this pistol.'

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". . . He played the part for her. None of the spectators thought it funny or silly. It was part of the familiar routine factory commonplace to see a fat, bald-headed director striding about, clutching his heart and sobbing."

What happened when Remember tried to take the falsely exploited "easiest way" in order to persuade another director to give her a part in his picture; how she finally worked her way in and upward where she found the real moral dangers, which have never been portrayed before-all these plus Rupert Hughes's well-known realism of style and characterization await the reader in Souls for Sale.

"THE CANYON OF THE FOOLS"

To call The Canyon of the Fools, by Richard Matthews Hallet, a novel of youth would perhaps create the false impression that here is simply another novel featuring the flapper. Better call it a novel of young love and adventure related in first person in a manner both sympathetic and humorous. It is the first novel by an author who has won a brilliant place in the short-story field. He will probably never write a novel of this same sort again, just as no one has ever written a novel like it before. How can a reviewer convey the illusion of youth which hopes all, dares all, and achieves all, within a few paragraphs-youth which is a continual drunkenness and a fever of the reason!"

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The Canyon of the Fools is the fruit of the author's astonishing contacts with life. After distinguishing himself at a great university, he shipped as a sailor in a cattle boat; passed months in the Australian Bush, stoked on a freighter, sought gold and experience in America, from North to South. The larger portion of his first novel is laid in the Canyon of the Fools, near the Mexican border, where men and women waste their years in search

of sudden wealth. of sudden wealth. However, the earlier scenes, while lacking the excitement of the above locale, are epic with a buoyant humor and romance.

The romance and the fun begin from the first moment our adolescent hero sees May Gowdy. "She stole over me," he relates, "she unsettled me, and filled me full of crazy, half-formed resolutions to pull off something big that would have that proud girl sinking to her knees by my side with little yearning cries-when it was all but too late."

And so he follows May Gowdy, who followed Jim, her fiancé, out to the Mexican border. While May travels in the passenger coach, he "beats his way" on a freight by "shipping" himself out, which is responsible for the following delightful situation that throws much light upon the social values and scales in the world of vagabondage:

"By late afternoon I had hooked up with another tadpole very much in my class-a study in migratory adolescence. . . . We were taken on as section hands, I think. It doesn't really matter. By this time I had come to look upon these mysterious shipments as not even conditioned on toil. I applied at the agencies with detached calm, and showed as much aggressiveness as if I had been doing business with a regulation ticket office.

He

"While the agent was filling out our blanks a thought occurred to him. halted his pen in midair and said, 'I suppose you boys know it's pretty tough down there.'

"Yes, certainly we did. . . . But he had a damaging interrogation in reserve for us. He wanted to know what baggage we had. We told him eagerly that we had none, thinking it would please him to learn that we traveled light. On the contrary, he infcrmed us that some form of baggage was imperative. "Blankets, for example. Blankets will lo for baggage,' he suggested, hopefully. "We have no blankets.'

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"Can't ship you without blankets,' the agent said, and he slipped the pen back of his ear, and back we went flop into the great undifferentiated as far as he was concerned. His orders were strict.

"Do you know, in some strange way a blanket out there had become the symbol of a man's honesty and of his respectability. If he had a blanket he was a man of property and a salable citizen capable of making a

Here is the proof of the genius of the author of "Three Soldiers." "If he never does anything better he will live as the author of this book. As full of color as a canvas of Sorolla."-St. Louis Globe-Democrat. $2.00

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MR. PROHACK Arnold Bennett "Amusing past words. Rollicking, brilliant, debonnaire, brisk, sportive, frolicsome, waggish -in a word a rattling tale."-Chicago Tribune.

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THE EYES OF LOVE Corra Harris A highly humorous and knowing novel in which the author of "A Circuit Rider's Wife" amuses herself and the world at large by a flagrant betrayal of the occult art of being a woman. $1.75 THE FIRST PERSON SINGULAR

William Rose Benet A delightful romance and mystery, set in an oldfashioned community. Mr. Bénet's modernity of style and manner reminds one of excellent jazz on a very resonant spinet. By the Associate Editor of the Literary Review of the New York Post. $1.75 PETER E. F. Benson

A study in the quality of love between Peter, charming, detached, the favorite of society matrons, and his young wife. As deft a handling of emotion as Benson has done. $1.75

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Ernest Pérochon