tres round a competition
for an art scholarship, into which Margery and the other girls of the
convent school enter. Margery selects Joan of Arc as her subject; and,
rather to the horror of the good nuns, who think that the saint should
have her golden aureole, and be as gorgeous and as ecclesiastical as
bright paints and bad drawing can make her, the picture represents a
common peasant girl, standing in an old orchard, and listening in
ignorant terror to the strange voices whispering in her ear. The scene
in which she shows her sketch for the first time to the art master and
the Mother Superior is very cleverly rendered indeed, and shows
considerable dramatic power.

Of course, a good deal of opposition takes place, but ultimately Margery
has her own way and, in spite of a wicked plot set on foot by a jealous
competitor, who persuades the Mother Superior that the picture is not
Margery's own work, she succeeds in winning the prize. The whole account
of the gradual development of the conception in the girl's mind, and the
various attempts she makes to give her dream its perfect form, is
extremely interesting and, indeed, the book deserves a place among what
Sir George Trevelyan has happily termed 'the art-literature' of our day.
Mr. Ruskin in prose, and Mr. Browning in poetry, were the first who drew
for us the workings of the artist soul, the first who led us from the
painting or statue to the hand that fashioned it, and the brain that gave
it life. They seem to have made art more expressive for us, to have
shown us a passionate humanity lying behind line and colour. Theirs was
the seed of this new literature, and theirs, too, is its flower; but it
is pleasant to note their influence on Miss Corkran's little story, in
which the creation of a picture forms the dominant motif.

* * * * *

Mrs. Pfeiffer's Women and Work is a collection of most interesting essays
on the relation to health and physical development of the higher
education of girls, and the intellectual or more systematised effort of
woman. Mrs. Pfeiffer, who writes a most admirable prose style, deals in
succession with the sentimental difficulty, with the economic problem,
and with the arguments of physiologists. She boldly grapples with
Professor Romanes, whose recent article in the Nineteenth Century, on the
leading characters which mentally differentiate men and women, attracted
so much attention, and produces some very valuable statistics from