A small, low room with walls of cool green-grey; in the center an old brown fire-place with a great black chimney; on the hearth a light like a deep raspberry; at each end a chair of smudgy brown; near the front a table toned with the walls; on it two black mugs and a stein; in one corner at the back, piled against the green-grey, flour sacks the color of dirty straw; and standing in the foreground, balanced as Whistler would have done it, a miller in a suit of brown, a thin widow in rusty black, a fat widow with bustles in rusty black and dirty white.--Somehow one planned beauty in that place. The Novel of Manners ... And yet, even into Mrs. Wharton's work is creeping slowly a part of the tremendous socializing spirit of today--the realization that group backgrounds, unlighted by a sense of their relativity to other groups, and to life, do not amount to much more than painted scenery. Over in England, Wells, with all his tremendous burden of national background and customs, manages, often with a desperate wrenching of impedimenta, but always with a great resolve that commands admiration, to inject into his massive English settings a humanized world atmosphere as well. Wells writes not of Englishmen and England, but of Englishmen and the world. And Galsworthy, his soul permeated by this new social sense, writes down, in his English men and women, all humanity, with all the tragedy and plaintive joys of human life, with the desires and hampered fruition of the desires of all living things, as his background. Not the world alone, but life, is the stage.--Edna Kenton in _The Bookman_. A man should always obey the law with his body and always disobey it with his mind.--James Stephens in _The Crock of Gold_. There are two great rules of life, the one general and the other particular. The first is that everyone can, in the end, get what he wants if he only tries. This is the general rule. The particular rule is that every individual is, more or less, an exception to the general rule.--_The Note-Books of Samuel Butler._ Forbes-Robertson's Hamlet