Miss Flaherty is one of those women who appear from time to time in the newspaper world and who seem to embody in their own personalities the essential differences between journalism and literature. Their equipment is trivial and their industry colossal. In a literary sense they are so prolific that they do not beget; they spawn. They present a marvellous combination of unquenchable enthusiasm and slovenly inaccuracy. They needs must love the highest when they see it, but they are congenitally incapable of describing it correctly. Their conception of art consists of writing a book describing their own sexual impulses. This is frequently so ungrammatical and obscure that even publishers' readers balk at it, and it goes the rounds. In the meanwhile, they produce an incredible quantity of daily and weekly matter for the press. They wheedle commissions out of male editors by appealing to their sex, and write sprightly articles on Bachelor Girls and their Ideals, and the Economic Independence of the Married Woman. They become hysterically lachrymose, in print, over a romantic love affair, and relapse into sordid intrigues on the sly. They demand political power without intending for a single moment to assume political responsibility. Their days are about equally divided between catching a husband and achieving what they describe as "a scoop." To all this Miss Flaherty adds an unusual faculty for spectacular antics. She has dressed in a red sweater and plied her trade, for a day, as a shoe-shine boy. She has dressed in a green cloak and sold shamrock on St. Patrick's day. She has dressed in rags and sung in the streets for charity. She has hired a van and ridden about the suburbs pretending to sell domestic articles. She has attended revival meetings and thrown herself in a spasm of ecstasy upon what she calls the mercy-seat. She has.... But the author is not absolutely sure whether she has ... after all. He is of the opinion that, like most English women, she has no talent for that sort of thing. Like most young women who babble of emancipation she has an unsuspected aptitude for domesticity. She makes tea far better than she writes articles. She is, under a ridiculous assumption of slangy modernity, oppressively conventional.