an to decide than for a woman; but to me Mr. Bennett's
account seems plausible. What is mainly important is that Hilda,
whether she is psychologically true to life or not, is, at any rate,
a conceivable person. She is presented as one more example of the
spirit too large for its habitation. Cooped up with her mother in a
little house in the Five Towns, she was in trouble not the less acute
because "the trouble was that she wanted she knew not what." Hilda,
maturing, steadfast, idealistic, with a desperate readiness to live
through the inferior things of life if she could not now grasp the
best, with a vitality which enables her to emerge again and again from
tragedy that for most people would be final, is a contrast to her
rather futile, fussy, merely experienced mother. Hilda flings herself
into the work of a provincial newspaper office with the ardour of her
idealism. Here was something she had set her mind on, and the
practical quest was a religious passion, tragic in its way because the
real result of the work was so paltry and sordid.

What was she? Nothing but a clerk at a commencing salary of fifteen
shillings per week! Ah! but she was a priestess! She had a vocation
which was unsoiled by the economic excuse. She was a pioneer. No young
woman had ever done what she was doing. She was the only girl in the
Five Towns who knew shorthand.

And Mr. Bennett succeeds in interesting us in the ambitious,
speculative Cannon mainly by reason of the pathetically inadequate
objects on which he lavishes the passion of his energies and his
ideals--on a newspaper, a corrupt thing--on a boarding-house, a centre
of triviality. And Miss Gailey, whose heart is set on her hot-water
bottle and her cup of tea, and the easing of her rheumatism, interests
us profoundly, because it is such death-in-life which may prove
tragically destructive to the ascendant nature of a Hilda.

Mr. Bennett is not afraid of the drab side of life. But he never shows
peevishness on the one side nor bloodless romanticism on the other. He
sees this drab side, and he sees the passion of life--the aspiring
human always trying to be more than it is, or can be, in some
desperate, foolish way. This is the tragedy and the hopefulness of
tragedy which Mr. Bennett has grasped. To possess a keen faculty of
observation by which to present life exactly and realistically, and at
the same time to re-imagine these facts so that the vividness, the
intensity, the pitiful p