It is when she comes to the sentimental side of her subject, the relation of woman to man whether in marriage or “free love,” that Mme. Villard finds her material a little too much for her. Naturally, for our novelists and playwrights can never let the too fascinating subject alone and seem to go on saying the same things about it over and over again—_con variazioni_. You have, for example, Mrs. Gaskell, so far back as 1850, dealing with the same theme as Mr. Stanley Houghton dealt with in “Hindle Wakes” (1910)—the refusal of the seduced woman to accept the regularization of her position by marriage. Then there are the free-lovers “on principle,” who end by conceding marriage to social prejudice—like Mr. Wells’s Ann Veronica. There must be English novels where the “free lovers” maintain their principle triumphantly to the end, though I haven’t read them; but I seem to remember several in the French language. It is all very confusing. Perhaps—I only say perhaps—those are wisest who leave “principle” in these matters to the heroes and heroines of the novelists and are content to live ordinary lives in an ordinary jog-trot way, without too much thinking about it. There is this comfort for the old-fashioned commonplace people among us, at any rate, that whatever “evolution” of woman there may have been in the nineteenth century, she remains in all essentials very much what she used to be. I can find it as easy to-day to be in love with Emma and Elizabeth and Anne—I needn’t mention their surnames—who are more than a century old, bless them, as with (not to compromise myself with any contemporary English heroine) M. Barrès’s Bérénice, or with one of M. Marcel Proust’s “Jeunes filles en Fleurs.” PICKLES AND PICARDS A writer in the _Nouvelle Revue Française_ drops a remark which it does one good to read. He says that in the old French villages on the Picardy front all that the English have taught the countryfolk in five years of cohabitation is to eat pickles with their boiled beef. Very likely this is a humorous perversion of the truth; but I should like to believe it. Not from any personal interest in pickles, though that will seem odd, and perhaps incredible, to my French friends, who seem to think that every Englishman must be a pickle-eater—just as we English used to think every Frenchman ate frogs. No doubt, however, this French generalization is fairly accurate; we are a nation of pickle-eaters, and if any one asks why, I guess the answer is cold beef. Anyhow, the idea has fascinated the French mind. Among the English characteristics of which Jules Lemaître once gave a list (from hearsay, which he thought, good, easy man, as authentic evidence as coming to see England for himself) I remember he mentions “Les _pickles_.” And it is the one English characteristic that has infected the Picards!