I am unable at present to obtain a copy of _If Winter Comes_ (one of the advantages that I neglected to chronicle in the essay on Living Abroad); but I am struck by the similarity between the plot of Mr. Hutchinson’s novel, as I remember it, and that of _Some Do Not ..._ Mark Something-or-Other was a man whom the world in general regarded with indifference as a failure, and for whose excellent work somebody else was always getting the credit, but whom a few really fine spirits reverenced. So was Christopher Tietjens. Each was unhappily married, though (_If Winter Comes_ not being a sophisticated novel) Mark’s wife was merely stodgy and insensitive to her husband’s whimsical sweetness (bless her heart! she had all my sympathy), while Christopher’s Sylvia was--oh, dear me! Each hero loved another lady, really appreciative and good, who was eager to sacrifice, in Mark’s case her husband (unappreciative devil _he_ was, too!), in Christopher’s her virginity. Each hero refused the gift. (‘Some do not’ ... do that kind of thing). In neither case did the hero’s wife--or any one else except those few fine spirits--believe in the refusal. Each, instead of getting himself profitably _embusqué_, slipped off unassumingly to the war and was badly hurt. Each slipped back home again to take up modestly and wearily the old round--a good deal hampered in this by all those _embusqués_ who had pushed ahead in the meantime. Each, for no obvious reason, became a social pariah, was slandered and fairly hounded by the world in general--but not, of course, in the sophisticated novel, to the point of general hysterics reached in _If Winter Comes_. The endings, naturally, are different. Mark’s wife divorces him, the other lady’s husband is conveniently killed in France, and the lovers are felicitously united; Christopher Tietjens’ wife does not divorce him, he will not become Valentine’s clandestine lover, and he slips off again, even more unassumingly than before, to the war--presumably to be killed. Here, as unmistakably as in _The Green Hat_, we have the artificial stuff of melodrama. Hardly, since Richardson’s _Pamela_, has such feverish importance as in _Some Do Not ..._ been attached to the question of whether a man and a woman will or will not have sexual relations. The last two hundred pages of the book are virtually devoted to this problem, and to its answer--‘Some do not.’ Personally, I didn’t care in the least. Let them, if they wanted to, or not, only, for heaven’s sake, let them and every one else stop talking about it! What possible difference could it make to me?