t their way up, and no one can down them.
They can be depended upon absolutely as what are called 'good
providers.' In short, by the written confession of her heart, woman's
idea of a 'dear,' after several centuries more or less of civilisation,
remains precisely the primitive conception that it was in the days when
man wooed her by grabbing her by the hair and handing her one with a
club."

The Colonel was breathing heavily with the exertion of animated speech
as he added: "In real life a man of any stability of judgment would be
decidedly suspicious of the hero of a modern woman's novel if one
should walk into his office, or, doubtless, he would observe this
whimsical caricature with something of the amusement he would find in
the ludicrously false comic Irishman of the vaudeville stage. This
irreverent flight of fancy on our part, however, is yanking the strong
man from his appropriate and supporting setting, where paste is given
the glow of an authentic stone; in the sympathetic pages created by
feminine intuition he dominates the machine. When the heroine takes
into her own hands the right of the individual to a second chance for
happiness," the Colonel declaimed with a demoniac grin, "she turns to
experience with such a one perfect love, as the honoured wife of a
splendid and prosperous man and the mother of beautiful children.

"The ethics of that engrossing theme of divorce," the Colonel went on,
lighting another corpulent and very black cigar, "as decided by the
Supreme Court of our contemporary women novelists suggests that justly
celebrated principle of perfect equity: 'What's yours is mine and
what's mine is my own.' Listen," he demanded; "listen (as the author
of 'The Gentle Art of Making Enemies' was wont to introduce his
lectures) to the story of the unfolding of a woman's heart through
marriage, as it is unfolded in the recent book of a novelist whom both
the million-headed crowd and shoals of reviewers, of very uneven
critical equipment, place 'well forward among America's novelists.' A
penniless young woman brought up amid the standards of very common
people marries for money, and comes to face the collapse of her dreams.
She realises that she is tied to a man for whom she cares nothing.
Also he is a brute, a typical bad egg of a husband from the extensive
though rather monotonous stock of this article dealt in by our women
novelists. Is it right for this young woman to throw away the chances
o