But, as a rule, Mr. Kipling's "society" Anglo-Indians are not drawn better than those which other Indian novelists have created for our diversion. There is a sameness in the type of devouring female, and though Mr. Kipling devises several names for it, and would fain persuade us that Mrs. Herriott, and Mrs. Reiver, and Mrs. Hauksbee possess subtle differences which distinguish them, yet I confess I am not persuaded. They all--and the Venus Annodomini as well--appear to me to be the same high-coloured, rather ill-bred, not wholly spoiled professional coquette. Mr. Kipling seems to be too impatient of what he calls "the shiny toy-scum stuff people call civilisation" to paint these ladies very carefully. _The Phantom 'Rickshaw_, in which a hideously selfish man is made to tell the story of his own cruelty and of his mechanical remorse, is indeed highly original, but here it is the man, not the woman, in whom we are interested. The proposal of marriage in the dust-storm in _False Dawn_, a theatrical, lurid scene, though scarcely natural, is highly effective. The archery contest in _Cupid's Arrows_ needs only to be compared with a similar scene in _Daniel Deronda_ to show how much more closely Mr. Kipling keeps his eye on detail than George Eliot did. But these things are rare in this class of his stories, and too often the Anglo-Indian social episodes are choppy, unconvincing, and not very refined. All is changed when the central figure is a man. Mr. Kipling's officials and civilians are admirably vivid and of an amazing variety. If any one wishes to know why this new author has been received with joy and thankfulness by the Anglo-Saxon world, it is really not necessary for him to go further for a reason than to the moral tale of _The Conversion of Aurelian McGoggin_. Let the author of that tract speak for himself: "Every man is entitled to his own religious opinions; but no man--least of all a junior--has a right to thrust these down other men's throats. The Government sends out weird civilians now and again; but McGoggin was the queerest exported for a long time. He was clever--brilliantly clever--but his cleverness worked the wrong way. Instead of keeping to the study of the vernaculars, he had read some books written by a man called Comte, I think, and a man called Spencer, and a Professor Clifford. [You will find these books in the Library.] They deal with people's insides from the point of view of men who have no stomachs. There was no order against his reading them, but his mamma should have smacked him.... I do not say a word against this creed. It was made up in town, where there is nothing but machinery and asphalte and building--all shut in by the fog.... But in this country [India], where you really see humanity--raw, brown, naked humanity--with nothing between it and the blazing sky, and only the used-up, over-handled earth underfoot, the notion somehow dies away, and most folk come back to simpler theories."