It is interesting that "Diana of the Crossways" was the book first to attract American readers. It has some of the author's eccentricities at their worst. But it was in one respect an excellent choice: the heroine is thoroughly representative of the author and of the age; possibly this country is sympathetic to her for the reason that she seems indigenous. Diana furnishes a text for a dissertation on Meredith's limning of the sex, and of his conception of the mental relation of the sexes. She is a modern woman, not so much that she is superior in goodness to the ideal of woman established in the mid-Victorian period by Thackeray and Dickens, as that she is bigger and broader. She is the result of the process of social readjustment. Her story is that of a woman soul experiencing a succession of unions and through them learning the higher love. First, the marriage de convenance of an unawakened girl; then, a marriage wherein admiration, ambition and flattered pride play their parts; finally, the marriage with Redbourne, a union based on tried friendship, comradeship, respect, warming into passion that, like the sudden up-leap of flame on the altar, lifts the spirit onto ideal heights. Diana is an imperfect, sinning, aspiring, splendid creature. And in the narrative that surrounds her, we get Meredith's theory of the place of intellect in woman, and in the development of society. He has an intense conviction that the human mind should be so trained that woman can never fall back upon so-called instinct; he ruthlessly attacks her "intuition," so often lauded and made to cover a multitude of sins. When he remarks that she will be the last thing to be civilized by man, the satire is directed against man rather than against woman herself, since it is man who desires to keep her a creature of the so-called intuitions. A mighty champion of the sex, he never tires telling it that intellectual training is the sure way to all the equalities. This conviction makes him a stalwart enemy of sentimentalism, which is so fiercely satirized in "Sandra Belloni" in the persons of the Pole family. His works abound in passages in which this view is displayed, flashed before the reader in diamond-like epigram and aphorism. Not that he despises the emotions: those who know him thoroughly will recognize the absurdity of such a charge. Only he insists that they be regulated and used aright by the master, brain. The mishaps of his women come usually from the haphazard abeyance of feeling or from an unthinking bowing down to the arbitrary dictations of society. This insistence upon the application of reason (the reasoning process dictated by an age of science) to social situations, has led this writer to advise the setting aside of the marriage bond in certain circumstances. In both "Lord Ormont and his Aminta" and "One of our Conquerors" he advocates a greater freedom in this relation, to anticipate what time may bring to pass. It is enough here to say that this