ex officio more interesting than the bestower. I said earlier that in life, as well as in literature, men had changed. One's instances, obviously, must be from books, and not from one's acquaintance; but I spoke truth. Philanthropy is the latest social ladder, but it would not be so if the people on the top rung were not interested in philanthropy. There has been, for whatever reason, a tremendous spurt of interest in sociological questions. Our hardheaded young men, of high ideals, find themselves fighting, of necessity, on a different battlefield from any that strategists would have chosen thirty years ago. Moreover, philanthropy being woman's way into politics, women have been giving their calm, or hysterical, attention to problems which, thirty years since, did not, as problems, exist for them. I said that the change of taste in women would probably account for much of the change of fashion in men. A schoolmate of mine, writing me some years since of her engagement, said (in nearly these words), "He is tremendously interested in city missionary work; it wouldn't have been quite perfect if we hadn't had that in common." Both were spoiled darlings of fortune, but the statement was quite sincere. Undoubtedly, without that, it would not have been "quite perfect" in the eyes of either.

The mere conversation of the marriageable young has changed past belief. "Social service"

has usurped so many subjects! Have many people stopped to realize, I wonder, how completely the psychological novel and the "problem" play (in the old sense) have gone out of date? The psychology of hero and heroine, their emotional attitudes to each other, are largely worked out now in terms of their attitudes to impersonal questions, their religious or their sociological "principles." The indi-vidual personal reaction counts less and less. If they agree on the same panacea for the social evils, the author can usually patch up a passion sufficient for them to marry on. Gone, for the most part, are the pages of intimate analysis. No intimate analysis is needed any longer. As for the "problem play," we have it still with us, but in another form. The Doll's House and The Second Mrs. Tanqueray are both antiquated: we do not call a drama a problem play now unless it preaches a new kind of legislation. And as for sex-in its finer aspects it no longer interests us.

There was a great deal more sex, in its subtler manifestations, in the old novels and plays, than in the new ones. Not so long ago, a novel was a love-story; and it was of supreme importance to a hero whether or not he could make the heroine care for him. It was also of supreme importance to the heroine. The romance was all founded on sex; and yet sex was hardly mentioned. Our heroes and

heroines still marry; but when they consider sex at all, they are apt to consider it biologically, not romantically. We, as a public, are more frankly interested in sex than ever; but we think of it objectively, and a little brutally, in terms of demand and supply. And so we get often the pathetic spectacle of the hero and heroine having no time to make love to each other in the good old-fashioned way, because they are so busy suppressing the red-light dis-. trict and compiling statistics of disease. Much of the frankness, doubtless, is a good thing; but, beyond a doubt, it has cheapened passion. For passion among civilized people is a subtle thing; it is wrapped about with dreams and imaginings, and can bring human beings to salvation as well as to perdition. But when it is shown to us as the mere province of courtesans, small wonder that we turn from it to the hero who will have difficulty in feeling or inspiring it. Especially since we are told, at the same time, that even the courtesan plies her trade only from direst necessity.

After all, the only safe person to fall in love with nowadays is a reformer: socially, financially, and sentimentally. And most women, at least, could (if they would) say with the Princesse Mathilde, "Je n'aime que les romans dont je voudrais être l'héroïne." Certainly, unless for some special reason, no novel of which one would not like to be the heroine-in

love with the hero-will reach the hundred thousand mark. If there are any of us left who regret the gentlemen of old-who still prefer our Darcy or even our Plantagenet Palliserwe must write our own novels, and divine our own heroes under the protective coloring of their conventional breeding. For they are not being "featured," at present, either in life or in literature.

THE NEWEST WOMAN

T was the late George Meredith, if I mistake not, who was credited with bringing

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women into their joint inheritance of wit and passion. He himself supposed himself to discard, first of the novelists, the "veiled virginal doll." The jeune fille had, in the course of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, become somewhat dehumanized. She was far, indeed, from the frank heroines of Shakespeare, to whom every year was leap year. The heroine of the old-fashioned sentimental novel forsook her blushing, fainting, tear-shedding, letter-writing girlhood, only to become, on her wedding day, the British matron. There seems to have been no transition. Meredith apparently felt that the feminine share in romance was deplorably and inaccurately minimized. He exaggerated, perhaps. Scott gave us a few fine examples of the beautiful girl without frill or flutter, who was aware of her own mind. George Eliot knew a thing or two about her sex; and Jane Eyre, in her day, was notoriously explicit.

Not long since, indeed, having brought myself quite up to date with the fiction of the contemporary English school-even to the