A new woman who has been reading _God’s Fool_ laid it down at the last chapter with a long sigh. “What do you think of it,” I asked. “It is dramatic,” she said, “terribly dramatic at the end,” and then added, after a pause, “I wonder what the reading of the next generation will be like. We have reached a force and directness of narration that seems to me to be pretty near the limit of possibility. What will we have next?” “What do you think?” I asked. “I think,” she said, “we will have a reaction. We will take in more and give out less. We are near one of the great periods of what has been called revelation in the past. Our literature is shallow but perfect, relatively, in expression. Our art is the same throughout. Our politics are personal. Our religion is liberal, and loose in the joints. Our social life is insincere and imitative. Our lives have nothing in them to stir the deeps. There will be a reaction. The finesse of expression will be set aside for the tremendous earnestness that accompanies great events and prints their lessons on receptive minds. A break-up in Europe it may be, or some other social convulsion, that will change the tide. We are pretty near at the top of the flood now.” That’s the new woman’s view. I wonder how near she’s right? * * * * * Three hundred and twenty-seven thousand of my friends have individually sent to me a recent number of my Philadelphia contemporary, _Footlights_, in which it refers to THE PHILISTINE variously as a crow, a dicky bird and “a birdie of the jackass breed.” I am glad to be catalogued in this ornithological manner, and my friends may accept the listing as they please. As for myself, I’d rather be a good honest wild ass of the desert with long fuzzy ears than a poor imitation bird-of-paradise—stuffed by one hundred and seventeen geniuses. * * * * * A matter of architecture has been involved in the social problem which the _Arena_ has ever with it—like a stutter or a beer breath. According to an alleged novel recently published by the Arena Company and called _Edith, a Story of Chinatown_, a feature of the tabooed district of Los Angeles, California, is a bay window projection on the houses devoted to vice, wherein beauty spreads lures for the eyes of passers-by. The heroine of this lovely romance is one of these persons, sinned against in the prologue and sinning in the present, but discovered by a miraculous New York reporter on a vacation and returned to her broken-hearted parents and a good life. A benediction, with a remote hint of the Lohengrin march, ends the story. The _Arena_ gives two pages to a review of the book, which is very kind of the publisher, and tells us therein that a description of Alameda street and of Dupont street, San Francisco, which is worse, is its purpose. The _Arena_ can be depended on for a full stock of “terrible examples.” * * * * *