Among the "future-piercing suggestions" extolled by Mr. Shaw we may be sure that the author of "Man and Superman" was pleased to acknowledge Butler's prediscovery that woman is the pursuer. This idea we may now trace quite definitely to his relations with Miss Savage, a witty, sensible, presumably virtuous woman of about his own age, living in a club in London, who urged him to write fiction, read all his manuscripts, knitted him socks, reviewed his books in women's magazines and corresponded with him for years till she died, without his knowledge, in hospital from cancer. Her letters are Mr. Jones' mainstay in his first volume and she is, except Butler himself, altogether his most interesting personality. Mr. Jones says that being unable to find any one who could authorize him to use her letters, he publishes them on his own responsibility. But he adds, "I cannot imagine that any relation of hers who may read her letters will experience any feelings other than pride and delight." This lady, he tells us, was the original of Alethea Pontifex. But he marks a difference. Alethea was handsome. Miss Savage, he says, was short, fat, had hip disease, and "that kind of dowdiness which I used to associate with ladies who had been at school with my mother." Butler became persuaded that Miss Savage loved him; this bored him; and the correspondence would lapse till he felt the need of her cheery friendship again. On one occasion she wrote to him, "I wish that you did not know wrong from right." Mr. Jones believes that she was alluding to his scrupulousness in matters of business. Butler himself construed the words as an overture to which he was indisposed to respond. The debate on this point and the pretty uncertainty in which it is left can surely arouse in Miss Savage's relations no other feelings than "pride and delight." This brings us to the Butlerian substitute for the chivalry which used to be practised by those who bore what the Victorians called "the grand old name of gentleman." In his later years, after the death of Miss Savage, in periods of loneliness, depression and ill-health, Butler made notes on his correspondence reproaching himself for his ill-treatment of her. "He also," says his biographer, "tried to express his remorse" in two sonnets from which I extract some lines: She was too kind, wooed too persistently, Wrote moving letters to me day by day; Hard though I tried to love I tried in vain, For she was plain and lame and fat and short, Forty and overkind. 'Tis said that if a woman woo, no man Should leave her till she have prevailed; and, true, A man will yield for pity if he can, But if the flesh rebel what can he do? I could not; hence I grieve my whole life long The wrong I did in that I did no wrong.