This novel was followed by another, _The Heart of Life_, which was more or less constructed on the same lines, and also in response to a similar dual impulse. The scenery and the setting were those of my own early days in Devonshire. The home of the principal actors, as there depicted, is a compound of Glenthorne--I have mentioned its situation already, on the seaward borders of Exmoor--and of Denbury. Several of the characters are clergymen with whom I was once familiar. Mixed with these elements are certain scenes of fashionable life. All these accessories are almost photographically accurate; and the mere pleasure of reproducing them--or, as boys would say, the mere fun of reproducing them--was one of the motives which actuated me in writing this novel and rewriting it--for most of it was written over and over again. The main action, as in _A Human Document_, turned on the nature of the affections and the pangs of unhappy matrimony, these last conducting the two principal personages to a rest in which the heart of life, self-purified, is hardly distinguishable from the content of a Christian child's prayer. A third novel followed. This novel was _The Individualist_, of which the underlying subject was still the relation of religion to life, but the subject was handled in a spirit less of emotion than of pure social comedy. It was suggested by the movement, then beginning to effervesce, in favor of the rights of women, and by the semi-Socialist hysteria with which some of its leaders associated it, and in which many of them thought that they had discovered the foundations of a new faith. The most prominent character, though she is not in the ordinary sense the heroine, is Mrs. Norham, an ornament of intellectual Bloomsbury. Having certain independent means, she is far from being an opponent of private property as such. Her _bete noire_ is the fashionable or aristocratic classes, these being the true Antichrist; and she has founded a church whose main spiritual mission is to instigate an _elite_ of the obscure and earnest to despise them. By and by she meets some members of this despicable class herself. Among them is a Tory Prime Minister, who joins with his sister, an exceedingly fine lady, in expressing a respectful and profound admiration of her intellect. Mrs. Norham's philosophy of social religion hereupon undergoes such an appreciable change that she ultimately finds salvation in winding wool for a peeress, the only surviving thorns in her original crown of martyrdom being the loss of some money in a company formed for the production of a perpetual motion, and her discovery that a certain dinner party to which she has been asked is not sufficiently fashionable. This book, though in many respects a mere comedy of manners and characters--among the characters was a South African millionaire and his wife--was under the surface permeated by a serious meaning, being in effect an exhibition of the