all represent his
kindliness and his respectability. Sometimes he reads a shocker, the
sort that is known as 'railway literature,' presumably because it cannot
hold the attention for more than the time that elapses between two
stops.

The more serious and scholarly man, who abounds in every club, is
addicted to the monthly reviews, (price two-and-six; he does not like
the shilling ones), to the _Times_, to the _Spectator_; that kind of man
is definitely stodgy and prides himself upon being sound. He is fond of
memoirs, rather sodden accounts of aristocrats and politicians, of the
dull, ordinary lives of dull, ordinary people; when he has done with the
book it goes to the pulping machine, but some of the pulp gets into that
man's brain. ('Ashes to ashes, pulp to pulp.') He likes books of travel,
biographies, solid French books (strictly by academicians), political
works, economic works. His conversation sounds like it, and that is why
his wife is so bored; his emotions are reflex and run only round the
objects he can see; art cannot touch him, and no feather ever falls upon
his brow from an airy wing. He commonly tells you that good novels are
not written nowadays; he must be excused that opinion, for he never
tries to read them. The only novels with which the weary Titan refreshes
his mind are those of Thackeray, sometimes of Trollope; the more
frivolous sometimes go so far as to sip a little of the honey that falls
from the mellifluous lips of Mr A. C. Benson.

The condition of women is different. They care for little that ends in
'ic,' and so their consumption of novels is enormous. The commonplace
woman is attracted by the illustrated dailies and weeklies, but she also
needs large and continuous doses of religious sentimentality, of papier
mache romance, briefly, of novels described in literary circles as
'bilge,' such as the works of Mr Hall Caine, Mrs Barclay, Miss E. M.
Dell, and a great many more; if she is of the slightly faster kind that
gives smart lunch parties at the Strand Corner House, her diet is
sometimes a little stronger; she takes to novels of the orchid house and
the tiger's lair, to the artless erotics of Miss Elinor Glyn, Mr Hubert
Wales, and Miss Victoria Cross. She likes memoirs too, memoirs of vague
Bourbons and salacious Bonapartes; she takes great pleasure in the
historical irregularities of cardinals. She likes poetry too as conveyed
by Miss Ella Wheeler Wilcox.

If that type of woman were