ch dominates _The
Old Wives' Tale_, and supplies him with his theme in the play of
_Milestones_?

In _The Old Wives' Tale_ he presents a series of pictures which make
us realise that there are men and women about us who were brought up
in a world so totally unlike ours that we regard it as purely
historical. He has brought out this fact in a way that may cause
misgivings even to those who are still considered young. He takes us
back to the most vivid memories of our childhood. He recalls to us
what England was like and what people were like in an age when
electric trams were unknown, when bicycles were rare, when the retail
trader was a person who could still call his soul his own. He has
shown us people born in one world and growing old in another. He has
presented to us the fantastic but true panorama of certain persons who
were young and idealistic, who became middle-aged and practical, who
are now old and acquiescent; of persons who were born mid-Victorians,
who became later-Victorians, who to this day survive grotesquely among
the moderns--and again young men and women of to-day who themselves
will survive to a derelict old age among people as unlike us as we are
unlike the heroes of Mrs. Ward Beecher Stowe. No one of us will attain
a ripe old age without experiencing three different generations marked
by three different sets of habits, sentiments, ideals. Mr. Bennett's
subject is the tragi-comedy of growing old.

The author presented his people, and the places in which they lived,
in all the minutiae of their and its existence. He combined the
realistic modern method with the bitter, ironical, sententious method
of Thackeray. There is nothing in the first half of this book which
Thackeray would have done better, and Thackeray never illustrated a
law of life remorselessly working itself out as Mr. Bennett has done.
His mind and his perceptions are at work simultaneously. He is
alternately humorous and grim, but is too philosophical, interested,
and detached ever to be bitter. That was the world our fathers were
born in--he shows it to us--that is what our fathers are among us to
this day--and again we have the picture. "You cannot step twice into
the same river," said Heraclitus. "You cannot go back to the town you
were born in," Mr. Bennett means to say; and his book makes his
meaning clear.

Two sisters, Constance and Sophia, are the girls, women, widows whom
we see growing up from the 'fifties to the latter