The shop assistant as he hurries homewards at the close of his day’s work is moved with a sense of envy for the eager life of pleasure that wakes in the city only at the moment that he leaves it. His own life is tedious, with small excitements. He feels the need of vicarious sensation. The cover and title of Miss Cross’s masterpiece allures him. And as he journeys home he is pleasantly excited by the description of the painter’s intrigue with the Chinese. He feels otherwise, however, when he meets the heroine, and is confronted with what appears to him as a picture of nobility and self-sacrifice. He is deeply moved. That it is bad literature does not matter. It is enough that it should arouse in him the same thoughts and emotions that _Anna Karenin_ stirs in a man of letters. He feels himself in touch with a great passion, a passion that can override the convention of an hour and a place, that destroys life but makes of it first a thing worth having. In the world of popular fiction _Five Nights_ bears to _The Rosary_ the same relation that in the world of literature _Manon Lescaut_ bears to _On the Eve_. I read while I was a prisoner in Germany Elinor Glyn’s novel, _Three Weeks_, and I remember thinking that it was of its kind the very worst novel that I had ever read. The grand passion is as rare as genius, and it is as difficult to make the grand passion convincing in a novel as to make a genius convincing. The novels in which a grand passion has been “got over” could be counted on the fingers of one hand. But never, I felt, had any novel of passion failed more lamentably, more inexcusably, than _Three Weeks_. But, as I said, these things are relative. To a couple of my fellow-captives _Three Weeks_ was a window opening on the immortal meadows. For days they discussed it exhaustively from every point of view. It was, they were agreed, marvellously done. But they were doubtful of its morals; such ardour, they felt, was only permissible after a marriage ceremony, or, they were prepared to concede, as a prelude to one. But it was the less real part of them that doubted. Their instincts told them that the grand passion makes its own laws. And finally they yielded to their deeper nature. “After all,” they said, “those two were different from the rest of us. They were wonderful characters. You can’t judge them as you judge ordinary people.” It is with such words that we acquit Paolo and Francesca, Antony and Cleopatra, Lancelot and Guinevere. _Three Weeks_ said to my fellow-captives what _Antony and Cleopatra_ says to a cultured public. It was a focus for their belief in the grand passion.