We have a precisely similar situation in _The Mother of All Living_ by Mr. Keable. An emotional, but high-minded woman, whose husband was not aggressively incompatible, is here suddenly stirred to the depths—practically at first sight—by a cynical, handsome man of the world. There is absolutely no attempt whatever to even suggest any natural affinity in mind or tastes between the two; no urge except the unexplained, and inexplicable, mystery of the spark that fires sex. The abandon to which this unnatural awakening leads up belongs to quite a different type of woman; and when, at the eleventh hour, she repents in melodrama, we have still a third personality, no way like the girl her husband wooed and won. This is, perhaps, why Mr. Keable calls her _The Mother of all Living_, Eve incarnate, the World-Woman. As Mr. Masefield draws Mary Queen of Scots—too "big" for one lover. Both writers chose to forget, or to ignore, that love has no meaning, unless one's _whole_ self is expressed. Mr. Temple Thurston, again, in _The Green Bough_, seems resolutely determined to uphold Pope's dictum that "every woman is at heart a rake." Mary, indeed, is a woman "whom life had discarded and thrown aside"; whom, therefore, we are ready to judge leniently. It does _not_, therefore, follow "How vast a degree of false modesty there is in the world . . . it had _all been false_ that modesty which their mother had taught them." She, at any rate without modesty, sought and found love. So fine a thing this that she took it, without hesitation, from a married man, who had told her how much he loved his wife. "It happened—in a fortnight." Of her sisters, reproaching her, she declares "Jane thinks herself a true woman just because she's clung to modesty and chastity and a fierce reserve; but these things are only of true value when they're needed, and what man has needed them of us? _Who cares at all whether we've been chaste or pure?_ None but ourselves! And what made us care _but those false values_ that make Jane's shame of me? . . . You're not really ashamed of me. You're _envious, jealous, and you're stung with spite_. Calling me a servant girl or a woman of the streets only feeds your spite, it doesn't satisfy your heart. _You'd give all you know to have what I have._ . . . I'm going to have a child. . . . It's not a sin. It's not a shame. It's the most wonderful thing in the world." _There is one unanswerable reply to that fearful charge—"What man has needed chastity of us, who cares?"—a son's honouring of his mother, the man's instinct to defend his wife, his sister, or his child._ False, or forced, "modesty" may degenerate into "spite"; but it will be a sad day for human nature when all women are "jealous" of the "free!" Mr. Thurston seems to claim, in this novel, to be "the one man in the world who understands the truth about women." This is his reading of truth!