history of artistic London during the last quarter of a century. In the preface of the English edition of Sister Teresa Mr. Moore writes:— I found I had completed a great pile of Ms., and one day it occurred to me to consider the length of this Ms. To my surprise I found I had written about 150,000 words, and had only finished the first half of my story. I explained my difficulties to my publisher, suggesting that I should end the chapter I was then writing on what musicians would call ‘a full close,’ and that half the story should be published under the title of Evelyn Innes and half under the title of Sister Teresa. My publisher consented, frightened at the thought of a novel of a thousand pages—300,000 words. The story has not been altered, but the text is almost entirely new. No one, perhaps, has rewritten a book so completely. I am aware that the alteration of a published text is deprecated in the press, but it is difficult to understand why, for have not Shakespeare and Balzac and Goethe and Wagner and Fitzgerald rewritten their works? Among my contemporaries, George Meredith and W. B. Yeats have followed the example of their illustrious predecessors. The latter half of the book is by no means so brilliant, or even so convincing, as the first. But then its psychology is much finer, and it was infinitely harder to handle. Evelyn was bound to taste convent life. Morbid, fatigued by Wagner singing, triumphs, social and operatic, by her two lovers, her stomach deranged by dyspepsia, her nerves worn to an irritable thread by insomnia—is it any wonder the golden-haired girl, with the freckled face, regarded convent life as a green-blooming oasis in a wilderness of lust, vanity, and artificial worldliness! You can see that her mother’s spirit grows stronger in her every day, that mother with the cold eyes and thin lips who lost her voice so early in a great career. “The portrait of our father or our mother is a sort of crystal ball, into which we look in the hope of discovering our destiny.” Evelyn was tired of love, above all of animal love which dragged her soul from God. Ulick, for that reason, was more grateful to her. He was a mystic, with the dog-cold nose of mystics, and he soothed Evelyn when Sir Owen had ruffled her with his importunities, with his materialism. But these two men soon fade after the first hundred pages of the new story; indeed, they are lightly etched in at the best. “We have only to change our ideas to change our friends. Our friends are only a more or less imperfect embodiment of our ideas,” says Mr. Moore. The feigned friendship of the two is a truly Flaubertian note. It recalls a trait of Charles Bovary. The convent of the Passionist Sisters at Wimbledon, however, is the glowing core of this remarkable tale. For nuns, for convents and monasteries, the life contemplative, this Irish novelist has always had a deep liking. There is John Norton