and money to spend and piles of invitation cards, and so forth.  His proposal of marriage, practically the first word he has ever said to her outside their business relations, seems to her too good to be true.  There is no question of a grand passion, not even a question of every-day romance.  It is just a fair exchange, though she is too young to appreciate the man’s motives and is content with the pride of being his choice and the prospects of the wonderful life that opens before her.

Three months later (they are married and in their different ways have grown to care for one another) we find her discontented.  Her social blunders and the attitude of his people have set her on edge, and we are further to understand that she is not very responsive to the strength of his feelings for her.  A bad shock comes when she hears, through a jealous woman-friend of his bachelor days, that he has married her for the sake of a son.  This poisons for her the memory of their first union and she refuses to be his wife again.

An old obligation, entered into before his marriage, compels him to go abroad on business where she cannot accompany him.  He does not know that she is to have a child, and in his absence she keeps the knowledge from him.  Her boy is born and dies.  The news, reaching Holdsworth through a brother, brings him home, and husband and wife are reconciled.  Such is the plot, told crudely enough.

Now, if Miss SOWERBY meant deliberately to create a woman who does not really know what she wants—­a creature of moods without assignable motives—­then I am not ashamed of failing to understand her Sheila, since her Sheila did not understand herself.  But if she is designed to illustrate the eternal feminine (always supposing that there is such a thing) then I protest that her chief claim to be representative of her sex is her unreasonableness.  Of course I should never pretend to say of a woman in drama or fiction that she has not been drawn true to nature.  To know one man is, in most essentials, to know all men; to know fifty women (though this may be a liberal education) does not advance you very far in knowledge of a sex that has never been standardized.

When we first meet Sheila her idea of happiness is to spend an evening (innocent of escort) at the picture-palace; take this from her and her heart threatens to break.  Three short months and she has developed to the point of breaking off relations with a husband who has given her all the picture-palaces she wanted, but has also committed the unpardonable indecency of marrying her with the object of getting a son!

[Illustration:  THE VICE OF INCONSTANCY.

Sheila.  “BEFORE YOU MARRIED ME YOU WEREN’T NEARLY SO NICE TO ME.  IT’S HORRID OF YOU TO CHANGE.”

Mark Holdsworth..  MR. C. AUBREY SMITH.