Crown 8vo, Cloth. Price 6s. 



AN EXCEPTIONAL NOVEL. 

 By the Author of " The Woman Who Didrit? 



PAU LA: 



A SKETCH FROM LIFE. 

 BY VICTORIA CROSS. 



The theme of this story presents a study of the conflict of Art and 

 Life. Paula Heywood, the daughter of a country parson, comes up to 

 London with her brother on the death of her father, who has endowed 

 his children with a brilliant education, but who leaves them without 

 means. Young Heywood manages to find pupils to whom he gives 

 music-lessons, while Paula becomes an unimportant "super" at a 

 theatre ; they thus eke out a precarious living. Paula's ambitions, 

 however, are great. She is a girl of singular beauty, as well as of 

 singular powers, in which latter she has the vast belief of inexperience, 

 and she is bitterly discontent with their lot. She has written a play, 

 which she has tried in vain to get accepted. Through the medium of 

 Vincent Halham, a young Australian capitalist who is taking a rest 

 from work in London, she obtains an introduction to Reeves, the 

 manager of a West-end theatre. A strong attachment has meanwhile 

 sprung up between Halham and Paula ; Reeves, however, finding how 

 much luck has thrown in his way, not only in the gifts and person of 

 the girl, but also in her play, will consent to produce it (Halham at the 

 time being unable to do so) only on the condition that Paula marries 

 him. Passionately absorbed for the time being in the assertion of her 

 individual powers and in devotion to her art, Paula renounces Halham 

 and consents to an anomalous marriage, to the realities of which she is 

 not long in awaking. She reaches the extreme heights of her artistic 

 ambition without having found happiness as a woman, and the woman 

 in her before long asserts itself. To sketch this dramatic and tragic 

 story further would only tend to spoil the reader's interest in it. While 

 intently realistic in detail, it is onejwhich yet possesses all the movement 

 and interest of romance. 



London : WALTER SCOTT, LIMITED, Paternoster Square. 



