As in life, we saw that the best feelings of an ordinary decent sort of man are expressed, as his ultimate happiness is secured, by 'putting up with his wife's tantrums for love of her dear self.' That is, by some kind of self-control about the small things of life for the sake of the big; an instinctive knowledge of values or sense of proportion; mutual accommodation, and self-expression in self-sacrifice. He would not rush away from her for a change or new experience, to that placid domesticity which, because he had missed it, he—for a moment—supposed would prove ideal. Nevertheless, it is absolutely clear that his decision does _not_ establish the superiority of passion-storms over carpet slippers. He chose between two women, not between two modes of life: a matter of temperament, and the man's individual, permanent feeling. Though married, he had not—as he too hastily imagined—fallen "out of" love. Life is distorted to-day by the orgy of crude passion in most second-rate fiction, of which Mr. Evan Morgan's _Trial by Ordeal_ is an extreme case. Unfortunately such novelists have the smart air of being absolutely at home all over the world, without really knowing their way about anywhere. The leading lady of this brightly variegated human manure-heap is a "vampire, like a sea-breeze, like the noise of a waterfall at night"; her familiar ally is a discreet "sort of lady dressmaker, whose sons, numbering almost equally with her lovers, had forced her to take to a genteel trade." It is a picture of life among "bolsters with the temperaments of wood-lice; . . . among talented women, gifted women, immoral women." Here Miss Hazell O'Neill "netted a half-blind poet, whom she took out and dusted on bright days and holidays." Him she ultimately left, as part of her luggage, to a landlady in Jersey; and proceeded to "smash a sculptor with his own statue." Caught at last by "romance," falling in love with a man who wondered—"would she be more trouble than she was worth"; this determined young woman "leapt up and began undressing . . . plunged into the water"; so that "the momentary glance he had of her naked beauty, the excitement, overcame him." The hero, in his "first affair" with "the daughter of a very respectable God-fearing parson," carefully taught her the new ideals of "free love, free conscience, free everything . . . hoping himself to reap the fruit of his labours." Submitting, however, to the "ceremonial" of marriage, he was caught in his own trap. She was now "enlightened," and "dreading suddenly the binding nature of the service," ran away, at the eleventh hour, with another man. Afterwards "she came back ill, very ill, and he left her to sink or swim." Such is the chivalry of free love; that ultimately drove her to become "a horrible, decadent, drug-maniac."