"You know very well that I can't help it," our heroine answered. This was not polite, but at least it had a more engaging quality of boldness than anything she had said before. But soon she was fluttering again. "Oh, you have only to say I'm a nuisance! I assure you that if you'd rather I left you alone I won't speak another word," continued the young man. This seemed reassuring enough, but it has a devastating effect upon our heroine, for we find that "Her mouth twitched, and she looked at the ground." Eventually she and the young man were married. He had spoken to her without an introduction, and he was enough of a gentleman to realize that he must right the wrong and make an honest woman of her. Although we have not yet finished the book, we rather suspect that they will not be very happy. Merrick's good women never are. They all suffer terrifically just because they lack the ability to bulwark their virtue behind a couple of snappy comebacks, such as, "Where do you get that stuff?" or, "How do you get that way?" Just Around the Corner We sometimes wonder just how and what Joseph Conrad would have written if he had never gone to sea. It may be that he would never have written at all if he had not been urged on by the emotion which he felt about ships and seas and great winds. And yet we regret sometimes that he is so definitely sea-struck. After all, Conrad is a man so keen in his understanding of the human heart that he can reach deep places. It is sometimes a pity, therefore, that he is so much concerned with researches which take him down into nothing more than water, which, even at its mightiest, is no such infinite element as the mind of man. Typhoons and hurricanes make a brave show of noise and fury, but there is nothing in them but wind. No storm which Conrad ever pictured could be half so extraordinary as the tumult which went on in the soul of Lord Jim. We notice at this point that we have used heart and mind and soul without defining what we meant by any of them. We mean the same thing in each case, but for the life of us we don't know just what it is. _Lord Jim_, of course, is a great book, but to our mind the real battle is a bit obscured by the strangeness and the vividness of the external adventures through which the hero passes. There is danger that the attention of the reader may be distracted by silent seas and savage tribes and jungles from the fact that Jim's fight was really fought just behind his forehead; that it was a fight which might have taken place in Trafalgar Square or Harlem or Emporia.