"Balmy. Don't you know that expression?" Helena, on the floor, with her hands under her knees, watched her companion's looks with a grin. "It's _our_ language now, you know--English--the language of us young people. The old ones have got to learn it as we speak it." Mrs. Ward would no doubt be shocked by a writer who delivered his, or her, views on the French people with an obvious ignorance of the French language. She would despise the affectation of an author who used Latin tags incorrectly. But it is only fair to say that her views on the younger generation are rendered slightly ridiculous by her obvious ignorance of its idioms. She would perhaps have been better employed in a detailed picture of the manners of 1913, a period to which she doubtless looks back as to a lost paradise of decorous behaviour. Mr. Galsworthy's _Saint's Progress_ suffers less from insufficient documentation. His heroine Noel, with her short hair, is the daughter of a clergyman, and follows the course gloomily foretold for so many young girls during the war-period to the predestined end of bearing a war-baby. She and her sister Gratian are forced by the pressure of events to think and act for themselves. Gratian, safely married to a doctor, delivers herself as follows: "Dad," said Gratian suddenly, "we can only find out for ourselves, even if we do singe our wings in doing it. We've been reading James's _Pragmatism_. George says the only chapter that's important is missing--the one on ethics, to show that what we do is not wrong till it's proved wrong by the result. I suppose he was afraid to deliver that lecture." But, while Mr. Galsworthy is much superior to Mrs. Ward in the accuracy of his information, he can hardly be said to be superior to her in the justice and clearness of his presentation. The traits of his persons are correctly observed and generalised, but they are not shown through the medium of living individuals. We feel of Noel that many girls of such a disposition found themselves in such circumstances and behaved thus; and so far, regarded as a sociological study, the book is deserving of praise. But what we never feel is that the individual girl, Noel, ever existed; and by the deficiency it is condemned as a novel. This book will be a serious disappointment to those who imagined from _Five Tales_ that Mr. Galsworthy had recovered the original freshness of his talent and was about to begin a new and a sincerer period.