Mr. Bennett elicits something of this effect of the marvellous from the familiar by putting the life-story of Hilda Lessways on a foreground behind which lies the already familiar story of Edwin Clayhanger. We remember Clayhanger living in the printing shop in the Potteries; his uncouthness, his shyness, his pertinacity; his desire to be an architect and to live the imaginative life, thwarted by his grim old father; and the manner in which Hilda dawned upon him, entered into his experience in a brief rapture of passion, and disappeared, leaving Clayhanger to grope again with the commonplaces. And in this new story we see the life of the girl, the woman; she, too, groping among the commonplaces, with her heart set upon a wider experience, till a moment comes when her story coincides with and is complementary to that of Clayhanger. The speeches which we heard her make in the earlier story are heard again here, with greater comprehension; the apparently trifling words which fell from the lips of Clayhanger, scarcely heeded, are heard again now, and heard as they sounded to Hilda, grasping after a purpose and a fulfilment of herself. Mr. Bennett has endeavoured to examine the mind and heart of this woman from the inside. Whether the machinery of the emotions, the will, and the intellect really do work out just like this is a matter harder for a man to decide than for a woman; but to me Mr. Bennett's account seems plausible. What is mainly important is that Hilda, whether she is psychologically true to life or not, is, at any rate, a conceivable person. She is presented as one more example of the spirit too large for its habitation. Cooped up with her mother in a little house in the Five Towns, she was in trouble not the less acute because "the trouble was that she wanted she knew not what." Hilda, maturing, steadfast, idealistic, with a desperate readiness to live through the inferior things of life if she could not now grasp the best, with a vitality which enables her to emerge again and again from tragedy that for most people would be final, is a contrast to her rather futile, fussy, merely experienced mother. Hilda flings herself into the work of a provincial newspaper office with the ardour of her idealism. Here was something she had set her mind on, and the practical quest was a religious passion, tragic in its way because the real result of the work was so paltry and sordid. What was she? Nothing but a clerk at a commencing salary of fifteen shillings per week! Ah! but she was a priestess! She had a vocation which was unsoiled by the economic excuse. She was a pioneer. No young woman had ever done what she was doing. She was the only girl in the Five Towns who knew shorthand.