raining diamonds into the pale-blue water--that so poignantly English seaside smell of salt sand and pears in paper bags, of muslin frocks and dusty shrubs and warm asphalt. It might be such a day in England now, such a day at Eastbourne or Hastings. The notion of enduring any longer these flat Rumanian fields, this restless and uncertain existence upon the fringe of reality, this pilgrimage in charge of a butterfly that must soon or late be caught, clouded her imagination. "In seeking to direct Queenie's course I am doing something that is contrary to my dearest theory of behavior. When I met her again at Jassy I was in an abnormal and hysterical condition. The sense of having failed myself led me to seize desperately upon her salvation to justify this long withdrawal from the activity of my own world. This world of gipsies is no longer my world. Why, I believe that the real reason I feel annoyed with Philip is because, having roused in me a sense of my unsuitableness to my present conditions and actions, he does not trouble to understand the effect that talking to him had upon me. Here I am at thirty-two thinking like an _exaltée_ school-girl. Thirty-two! Just when I ought to be making the most tremendous efforts to anchor myself to some stable society that will carry me through the years to come, the years that without intellectual and spiritual pleasures will be nothing but a purgatory for my youth, I find myself more hopelessly adrift than ever before. It will end in my becoming a contemplative nun in one last desperate struggle to avoid futility. It is a tragedy for the man or woman who realizes futility without being able to escape from it. That's where the Middle Ages were wiser than we. Futility was impossible then. That's where we suffer from that ponderous bog of Victorianism. When one pauses to meditate upon the crimes of the Victorian era! And it's impossible not to dread a revival of Victorianism after this war. It's obvious that unless we defeat the Teuton quickly--and there's no sign of it--we shall be Teutonized in order to do it. And then indeed, O grave where is thy victory? Will the Keltic blood in England be enough to save her in ten years' time from a base alliance with these infernal Germans in order that the two stupidest nations in the world may combine to overlay it? Will this war at last bring home to Europe the sin of handing herself over to lawyers? Better the Middle Ages priest-ridden than To-day lawyer-ridden. At least if we are going to pay these rascals who exploit their country, let us have it well exploited. Don't let us call in one political plumber after another whose only object is to muddle the state for his successor to muddle it still more that he may be called in again to muddle it again--and muddle--and muddle eternally! When one reads in the papers the speeches of politicians, of what can one be reminded but of children playing cat's-cradle over the tortured