Reading exclusively from a single point of view, Mme. Villard seems to have sometimes sacrificed her critical sense to her principles. Thus, as a type of the nineteenth-century “old maid,” so neglected, so ill-used by society, she selects Miss Rachel Wardle! Dickens, generally “so pitiful to the weak, so generous to the oppressed and the conquered,” had no pity for her. But upon us it is incumbent to pity and understand and find excuses for her. “At any rate, her desire to be loved and, above all, to experience in other surroundings a freer and less humiliating life should have nothing surprising for us.” Isn’t this rather a solemn way of describing the lady’s amours with Mr. Tupman and Mr. Jingle? Is it really the fault of society if an amorous old dame will be silly? And is she not to be laughed at if she happen to fall into the category “old maid”? Mrs. Bardell was amorous too. So was Mr. Tupman. Dickens laughs at these also—but then they were not old maids, they didn’t illustrate a “feminine case.” Then there was Mrs. Jellyby. She reminded some people of Harriet Martineau. But Dickens had deformed the type (who was intelligent and was not the mother of a family) so as to present the “new woman” in the least favourable light. He “has fixed for half a century the type of the intellectual or enfranchised woman, as conceived by those who trust the judgment of others rather than their own direct observation.” The question, surely, is not whether Mrs. Jellyby was unlike Harriet Martineau, but whether in herself she was a sufficiently comic personage. Most readers of Dickens find her so. What injustice is there in this to the real “new woman,” whom, as Mme. Villard has shown, she did _not_ resemble? As a matter of fact, when Dickens had a mind to draw a real “strong-minded” woman he drew her most sympathetically. Is there any of his women more delightful than Miss Trotwood? “To-day,” says Mme. Villard, “she appears to us an unconscious feminist whose feminism misses its mark, since it can find no field of action amid narrow, provincial, routine surroundings.” Poor Miss Trotwood!