For the setting of her two succeeding books, “This is the End,” and “Living Alone,” Miss Benson created a world of her own, and in a foreword to the latter book she says: “This is not a real book. It does not deal with real people, nor should it be read by real people. But there are in the world so many real books already written for the benefit of real people, and there are still so many to be written, that I cannot believe that a little alien book such as this, written for the magically-inclined minority, can be considered too assertive a trespasser.” Her world is not the traditional fairyland of the nursery, nor are the supernatural endowments of some of the characters the classic equipment of witches and fairies, although her _dramatis personæ_ include both who function under the law of Magic. Rather is her dramatic machinery in these books a vehicle in the form of a sort of delicate symbolism for getting over a very sane attitude toward certain social foibles and trends of today. Incidentally it gives her opportunity of expressing this attitude in frequent witticisms and epigrammatic sayings for which she has a gift. In “Living Alone” social service and organised charity are the targets for her irony. She says, “Perception goes out of committees. The more committees you belong to, the less of ordinary life you will understand. When your daily round becomes nothing more than a round of committees you might as well be dead ... organizing work consists of sitting in 'busses bound for remote quarters of London, and ringing the bells of people who are almost always found to be away for a fortnight.” So after Sarah Brown, whose work consists of “sitting every morning in a small office, collecting evidence from charitable spies about the Naughty Poor, and, after wrapping the evidence in mysterious ciphers, writing it down very beautifully upon little cards, so that the next spy might have the benefit of all his forerunners' experience,” eats the magic sandwiches which the witch has given her for her lunch, the scales fall from her eyes. “I am sentimental,” she says to herself. [Illustration: STELLA BENSON] “It is sentimental to feel personal affection for a Case, or to give a child of the Naughty Poor a penny without full enquiry, or to say 'a-goo' to a grey pensive baby eating dirt on the pavement ... or in fact to confuse in any way the ideas of charity and love.” She resigns her “job” and her place on the committees and goes to live in the House of Living Alone.