h pressure of its injustices by exuberances of
humour and sentimentality. Mr. Brumley became charitable and
romantic,--orthodox still but charitable and romantic. He was all for
smashing with the generalization, but now in the particular instance he
was more and more for forgiveness. One finds creeping into the later
Euphemia books a Bret-Harte-like doctrine that a great number of bad
women are really good and a persuasion in the 'Raffles' key that a large
proportion of criminals are really very picturesque and admirable
fellows. One wonders how far Mr. Brumley's less ostensible life was
softening in harmony with this exterior change, this tender twilight of
principle. He wouldn't as yet face the sterner fact that most people who
are condemned by society, whether they are condemned justly or not, are
by the very gregariousness of man's nature debased, and that a law or
custom that stamps you as bad makes you bad. A great state should have
high and humane and considerate laws nobly planned, nobly administered
and needing none of these shabby little qualifications _sotto voce_. To
find goodness in the sinner and justification in the outcast is to
condemn the law, but as yet Mr. Brumley's heart failed where his
intelligence pointed towards that conclusion. He hadn't the courage to
revise his assumptions about right and wrong to that extent; he just
allowed them to get soft and sloppy. He waded, where there should be
firm ground. He waded toward wallowing. This is a perilous way of living
and the sad little end of Euphemia, flushed and coughing, left him no
doubt in many ways still more exposed to the temptations of the
sentimental byway and the emotional gloss. Happily this is a book about
Lady Harman and not an exhaustive monograph upon Mr. Brumley. We will
at least leave him the refuge of a few shadows.

Occasionally he would write an important signed review for the
_Twentieth Century_ or the _Hebdomadal Review_, and on one such occasion
he took in hand several studies of contemporary conditions by various
'New Witnesses,' 'Young Liberals,' _New Age_ rebels and associated
insurgent authors. He intended to be rather kindly with them, rather
disillusioned, quite sympathetic but essentially conventional and
conservative and sane. He sat at a little desk near the drooping Venus,
under the benediction of Euphemia's posthumous rose, and turned over the
pages of one of the least familiar of the group. The stuff was written
with