denied admittance to the magazines and the publishers’ catalogues. I don’t believe it. And at present the field appears to offer unusual opportunities, for not long ago Laura Jean Libbey decided (at least so I read in a New York paper) “to lay down her tired pen and give other women writers a chance.” Miss Libbey is furthermore said to have declared to the reporter who interviewed her on her retirement from the active world of letters, that in looking back upon her busy career she had but one regret; she sometimes feared that the name of one of her books was too long. When asked which one it could have been, she replied that it was the novel entitled, “You Would Not Have Blamed Her for Going Wrong, if You Had Known What the Conditions Were at Home.” “ANN VERONICA” About an hour ago I finished reading the latest novel of Mr. H. G. Wells. I laid it aside and since then I have been thinking about it. During the past month a great many other persons apparently have been doing precisely the same thing. For whatever may be one’s verdict on the novels of Mr. Wells, and the verdicts are absorbingly different, it cannot be said that these volumes do not incite one to think. The ordinary American and English novel does not. It may be, and often is, skilful and diverting; it holds the attention and “passes the time,” but on finishing it one immediately begins to think of something else. It almost never seems to be the cause of the slightest kind of mental result. Personally, I cannot, for instance, conceive of one’s reading a book by Mrs. Humphry Ward, Robert Chambers, Richard Harding Davis, Hamlin Garland, Robert Hichens, not to mention hundreds of others, and having, subsequently, any kind of mental reaction. They all without doubt write more or less well, amuse a great many people for a few hours, and incidentally make a good and honest living. But there it all ends. They are trained performers, and entirely justified because they are so well trained. They do things we are all accustomed to having well done and they do them better than most. Almost invariably I applaud the industrious Mrs. Ward when she produces still another work of fiction; it is usually so neat, so competent, so adequate, so professional. She once wrote with not much skill an important book, “Robert Elsmere,” and since then she has made an enormous income by writing with extreme skill books of no importance whatever. Toward the ordinary “good” writer of contemporary novels I confess that I feel very much as one feels at the theater devoted to vaudeville, when a lady hops along an almost invisible wire on one leg, or a gentleman gracefully promenades about the stage on his hands or his head. It is all rather difficult to do; it has taken time and training; it is diverting to watch and it is well paid for. But when the curtain descends one begins to think about the performing seals or the ventriloquist who is advertised to appear next. As soon as the act is over, it is over.