The greatest need of today is a pronoun of the common gender. It is beginning to be recognized that the generation now growing up to face the ultimate issues of living is one which will declare that spiritual experience is basically an unsexed phenomenon. Woman of today has been heard to declare that whatever charge can be made about man’s potentialities, even his propensities, can be charged alike to the woman. This is no meaningless attitude. Neither is it naive nor amusingly unscientific, when the young girl of the future lifts her voice and sings out, “Before she is woman or he is a man, man and woman are alike persons.” In this theorem, difficult to word, lies the fertile germ of suffrage, feminism, suffragettism, militantism, and all the other lifted voices of woman. No one of the women of Mr. Thurston’s portrayal is of value to herself or to the lives about her, except as a woman, a slave or queen of man, his toy or his inspiration, life’s parasite. The author would answer that he is not attempting a study of woman, but of an artist achieving by means of woman. None the less, if all the women who influence his artist were drawn in as hunchbacks, we would resent the distorted picture, the hypothesis that woman is essentially hunchbacked. Thus, since all the women in _Achievement_ are traditionally paralyzed women, we resent the generic theme of art under influence of womanhood. In order to receive serious audience today, any portrayal of woman, indirectly or directly, must recognize that there are genuine women as there are men, who live in terms of selfhood rather than in terms of sex. The denouement is the usual stock company curtain. However, if so many pistol shots per volume is a stipulation in the novelist’s contract, it must be conceded him that his telling of the murder is admirably simple. A more admirable simplicity is attained in the trenchant description of the murderer’s psychology after the deed. The author is to be congratulated for missing that “opportunity” for analysis, of which the usual fiction writer spins chapter after chapter, morbid, a snare to catch cheap horror and pity, a spider-web for flies. That the scene of the last two pages should have been written once is regrettable. That these pages were not cut out hastily as soon as written is unforgivable in an author who desires so profoundly to be in sympathy with the artist who has achieved. R. Ethel Sidgwick’s Books [_Small, Maynard and Company, Boston._]