Here, too, you perceive, you get inversion. These characters outrage, and thereby show themselves above, the conventions. They always react to stimuli in the opposite way from which average people react. They are violent when we should expect them to be well-bred, and serene when we expect them to be violent. Another example: to ingenuous people the disease called syphilis is a shameful thing, to be considered with horror and never to be mentioned aloud; to average people it is an aesthetically disgusting malady and therefore not an available subject for conversation. But the characters in sophisticated novels talk about syphilis as carelessly as though they were talking of a family-tree. But is there not in this, you may by now inquire, just a little monotony? Once the trick is apparent, is it not almost as wearisome to watch a man invariably do the unexpected thing as to watch him do the expected? There is. Oh, it is! It is more wearisome. Because when the expected thing is done for any reason more emotional than mere habit it is significant of something other than individual dullness; it has roots that penetrate down into the dark earthy past of a whole race. Whereas to do invariably the unexpected thing, in order to show oneself superior and startle an audience, is significant of nothing at all; beneath such behaviour is emptiness. Emptiness, indeed, yawns beneath the literature of sophistication. There is no probing of truth below the glitter. There cannot be, since the glitter is achieved through a superior disregard for truth. One would not mind this if the literature of sophistication set out only to be elegant amusing nonsense. (And I ought, in justice, to say here that if Mr. Ronald Firbank were somewhat more amusing, his contribution to such literature might fulfil that requirement). But too often it pretends to be investigating truth. And this pretence, even though in some cases it signify only a crowning sophisticated inversion, is impertinent and annoying. _The Green Hat_ lies open before me at the page of press comments which the publisher has seen fit to append. I read: ‘_The Green Hat_ is the novel of the year.’ ... ‘The most memorable novel I have read during the past year.’ ... ‘I call it the finest novel of the last five years.’ ... ‘Heavens! what a lot that man knows about men and women--especially women.’ If after this broadside one feels slightly giddy one should not hold it against Mr. Arlen, who of course is not responsible and who distinctly calls _The Green Hat_ a romance; but one would have thought that even reviewers might have had a little more insight than this into what they had pleasurably read.