er children--finds the book's tentative explorer, just now,
amply equipped with prejudices, whether acquired by second thought or
second hand, concerning the book's topic. As endurability goes,
reading the book rises forthwith almost to the level of an
afternoon-call where there is gossip about the neighbors and Germany's
future. We average-novel-readers may not, in either case, agree with
the opinions advanced; but at least our prejudices are aroused, and we
are interested.

And these "vital" themes awake our prejudices at the cost of a
minimum--if not always, as when Miss Corelli guides us, with a
positively negligible--tasking of our mental faculties. For such
exemption we average-novel-readers cannot but be properly grateful.
Nay, more than this: provided the novelist contrive to rouse our
prejudices, it matters with us not at all whether afterward they be
soothed or harrowed. To implicate our prejudices somehow, to raise in
us a partizanship in the tale's progress, is our sole request. Whether
this consummation be brought about through an arraignment of some
social condition which we personally either advocate or reprehend--the
attitude weighs little--or whether this interest be purchased with
placidly driveling preachments of generally "uplifting"
tendencies--vaguely titillating that vague intention which exists in us
all of becoming immaculate as soon as it is perfectly convenient--the
personal prejudices of us average-novel-readers are not lightly lulled
again to sleep.

In fact, the jealousy of any human prejudice against hinted
encroachment may safely be depended upon to spur us through an
astonishing number of pages--for all that it has of late been
complained among us, with some show of extenuation, that our original
intent in beginning certain of the recent "vital" novels was to kill
time, rather than eternity. And so, we average-novel-readers plod on
jealously to the end, whether we advance (to cite examples already
somewhat of yesterday) under the leadership of Mr. Upton Sinclair
aspersing the integrity of modern sausages and millionaires, or of Mr.
Hall Caine saying about Roman Catholics what ordinary people would
hesitate to impute to their relatives by marriage--or whether we be
more suavely allured onward by Mrs. Florence Barclay, or Mr. Sydnor
Harrison, with ingenuous indorsements of the New Testament and the
inherent womanliness of women.

The "vital" theme, then, let it be repeated, has