“That may be,” conceded Jones with reluctance, “but why not keep one’s mind open to every sincere and interesting experiment in the world of letters or the world of anything else? And there can be no question at all of Wells’s sincerity. With a most extraordinary intellectual equipment and gift for expression through the medium of words, he has undertaken in his novels to examine the Anglo-Saxon mind and heart and soul; to strip them of every vestige of their conventional garments and to display them quivering, real, naked. It is not only an attempt entirely new in English fiction, which in itself attracts my literary attention; it is, in the case of Wells, a successful attempt which both attracts my attention and firmly holds it.” “But I hate and detest and loathe ‘quivering’ souls and minds and hearts running around loose in fiction,” Smith almost shrieked. “I don’t wish to encounter them there; as a matter of fact, I don’t wish to encounter them anywhere. Sometimes on the journey through life one has to; the meeting is unavoidable, but I declare and protest that I have never sought an introduction to them. I don’t want them to be thrust upon me, ever.” At this point Mrs. Robinson suddenly tossed aside the doily she had been all along crocheting in receptive silence, and exclaimed: “I’ve read the book you two helpless and rather ridiculous men have been trying to discuss, and I think you have both missed the entire point of it. You’ve been chattering and gabbling about art and literature and morality but you haven’t touched at all on what is the backbone of the book. I’ve been listening to you, and you both express yourselves with conviction and some force; but both of you have missed the point.” Mrs. Robinson smiled at us wisely and maternally, including me, although I had kept out of the discussion. She is a woman of sixty-five. She has known the world, she has lived and she has thought, and on the subject of “Ann Veronica” she spoke as follows: