dest costume and colour, which courts no notice, but with the sacred inscription of "fourth edition" on its title-page, to shame those who have not yet made ac quaintance with the very charming woman of the period whose history, or at least a piece of her history, is herein given. 'Ideala' is one of the books which show the condition of the public mind, and what it is which secures the deepest attention at this particular moment among a large class at least of the more 66 'thoughtful" readers. It is not in the least like Robert Elsmere,' and does not take advantage of any religious question to secure attention. But it is equally the expression of a fashion of the varying public intelligence. It is not so forcible a study as to have demanded attention at a time when men's minds, or rather women's minds, were drawn in any other direction; but it is the expression of a great many thoughts of the moment, and of a desire which is stronger than it ever has been before, cultivated by many recent agitations and incidents, for a new development of feminine life, for an emancipation, which even those who wish for it most strongly could not define and scarcely understand. It is not to be supposed that we imply any contempt, or even a want of respect, in so characterising it. There is nothing worthy of slight or scorn in 'Ideala,' or in the feeling which is expressed and responded to in this book. Of all works of fiction women are the chief audience, and he who scorns such hearers had better hang his harp upon something quite apart from the book-shelves of Messrs Mudie, and betake himself to

science or philosophy: though even there he may not escape. The "ladies who had intelligence in love" were the chosen audience to whom Dante and the medieval poets appealed: so that this regiment of women is at least nothing new.

But Ideala' has to do with women in something different from this broad and general way. The heroine of this book is an example of the new sentiment which has been developed by, or which has been the cause of we do not know which to say-the singular and scarcely recognised revolution which has taken place in the position and aspirations of women during the last generation. This has been very great, though there may be many people who are unconscious of it. In Parliament, indeed, and elsewhere, men still use the old phraseology, and talk as if there was no important difference in the life or sentiments of the women by whom they are surrounded; but if we look back, we will find that the difference is immense, almost incalculable. Exceptional women always have done whatever might happen to be necessary for those they loved, with a defiance of all restrictions; but they were exceptional, and did not alter the rule. It is now, however, the rule that is altered; and hosts of young and ardent minds, once kept fairly in discipline and order, have begun to think and to wish and to struggle for their own career and destiny in a manner inconceivable to their mothers or at least to their grandmothers, let us say— for the mothers have veered round in sympathy with them to the new standing-point. A certain

number of martyrs have made the way and bore the brunt; have been called many bad names, and sometimes have deserved them for to be a pioneer even in a good way is not always a good, and very seldom is a pretty thing. There are some still, and those naturally the most prominent, who justify all the old vulgar commonplaces about the interference of women in matters which do not concern them; but the evil effect of these undesirable leaders is dying away in the general change which has come over the spirit of our dream. Our daughters are becoming what our sons used alone to be independent existences, conscious of warm individual life and wants and ambitions, and no longer hampered in the means of fulfilling these ambitions. It is only those whose aspirations are political who come prominently before the public; and these are the most easy to laugh at or to put down with a jeer (though also the most difficult; for the political women have come to be quite contemptuous of jeers which once would have fired them to passion). The other revolutionaries are much less easy to deal with, and they are every where. It is not a sect or a party, but an atmosphere, and it breathes through almost every educated household in the land.

A book like 'Ideala' is one of the most significant emanations of this atmosphere. It is a section of the story of a woman who has no story in the ordinary sense of the word, to whom nothing particular happens, yet who occupies from first to last the little stage, attracting by her thoughts and variations of mind what is evidently the absorbed attention of a very large audience. That her career is crossed by an impassioned epi

sode of love, as unlike the ordinary and well-worn love-story as can be conceived, a dangerous almost fatal episode, yet done all in honour, and vanquished at the critical moment by the higher sense of duty and moral obligation, is scarcely a necessary point in the history when that which is most important is herself, the new woman, the offspring of a changed world. Ideala is actually, we regret to say, something of 'a prig: but she is so naturally placed before us, and is so entirely the new woman she is professed to be, that we take no exception to that part of her character, but allow her to prelect from page to page without objection, with a pleasure in her attitude of mind, in the wisdom and want of wisdom, which runs through a great deal of talk, without resentment or even weariness. We should probably have been very tired of her twenty years ago, but we are not so now. Her absences of mind are sometimes amusing, as when she comes into a lawyer's office very much flushed and embarrassed, to ask him to lend her five shillings, as she has lost her purse.

"At least I think I have lost my purse. I took it out to give sixpence to a beggar-and-and here is the sixpence, and she held it out to me. She had given the purse to the beggar, and carried the sixpence off in triumph. 'You may well say, O Ideala'!'

"And Mr Lloyd was so very good as to take me to the station, and see me into the train,' Ideala murmured; 'and he gave me his bank-book to amuse me on the journey, and carried Huxley's 'Elementary Physiology,' which I had come in to buy, off in triumph!'"

There is a great deal of suppressed and quiet humour mingled with the lengthened utterances which one ought to be tired of, but is not. Ideala is not ve

sure about anything. She is very impartial, sometimes a little profane without meaning it, in her completely human way of treating everything, knowing no higher method: confused in life and many of its practical questions by the fact of being married to a brute, who is scarcely introduced into the book, but is indicated as a great deal too bad and brutal for any thing, which is the general weakness of such representations. It is improbable, we think, that a man who betrayed his wife's confidence in the immemorial way by coarse vice, would also have shut her out of the house and compelled her to spend a night in the garden, in order to subdue her to his will about a very trifling matter which she had promised but he in pure caprice forbade. The man who did the one thing probably would not do the other; but it is a very common error to paint an objectionable husband entirely in black. It is perfectly true, however, to the idea of the modern woman, that, having once been compelled to recognise what her husband is, she is not made frantic by his offences, as the woman, for instance, of the late Mrs Norton's time, would have been. She slips into the house as soon as it is opened in the morning, and goes on as if nothing had happened, putting aside the incident with the pride which belonged to a much earlier age-the days when family feeling and a proud deter

mination not to be talked about made women lock up such sorrows in their own bosoms. The fact of the brutal husband, however, as we have said, confuses many things to Ideala, and makes her rush upon what would have been her doom in the last generation. A friend recommends her, should she be in any trouble, to

ask the advice of a certain Mr Lorrimer, a functionary at a great hospital in a town near her, a man whom everybody consults, and in whose hands she would be safe When things come to the point with Ideala that she can endure no longer with the natural feeling that it would be easier to submit the difficult circumstances of her lot to a stranger than to the faithful advisers whom she has at hand, and in the belief that the person so recommended to her must be an old man-she betakes herself to the hospital, and asks for Mr Lorrimer. He proves to be young and handsome, and so is she; and the inevitable result occurs. The two fall passionately in love with each other. There is a period during which this passion grows unconsciously in the woman's fine nature, and her desire to be with him, to tell him everything, to receive his sympathy and the record of his experience in return. At last she gets ill, distracted, miserable;, and circumstances occur which make her believe that he is forsaking her, though all this while not a word has been said of love. She comes at last to the house of the friend who tells the story, with a look of recovered health and happiness, in which there is something, however, which holds him in anxiety.

"I hope you are going to stay with us some time now, Ideala,' I added, glancing up at her as she came and looked over my shoulder at the pic

ture.

"Her face clouded. 'I-I am afraid not,' she answered hesitating, and nervously fidgeting with some paint-brushes that lay on a table. ‘I am afraid you will not want me when you know what I am going to do. I only came back to tell you.'

"My heart stood still. "To tell me! Why, what are you going to do?'

"It is very hard to tell, she faltered. 'You and Claudia are my dearest friends, and I cannot bear to give you pain. But I must tell you at once. It is only right that you should know, especially as you will disapprove.'

"I turned to look at her, but she would not meet my eyes. 'Give us pain! disapprove!' I exclaimed. 'What on earth do you mean, Ideala? What are you going to do?'

"An immoral thing,' she answered. "Good heavens! I exclaimed, throwing down my palette, and rising to confront her. 'I don't believe it.'

""I mean,' she stammered, the blood rushing into her face, then leaving her white as she spoke, 'something which you will consider so.'

"I cannot believe it,' I reiterated
"But it is true-he says so.'
"He-who, in God's name?'
"Lorrimer.'

"And who on earth is Lorrimer?' "That is what I came to tell you,' she answered, faintly."

She then tells with much simplicity and straightforwardness the story of their intercourse, and of a misunderstanding between them which had brought matters to a crisis.

"But, Ideala,' I said to her, 'you used the word "immoral " just now. You were talking at random, surely? You are nervous. For heaven's sake, collect yourself, and tell me what all this means.'

"No, I am not nervous,' she answered. 'See! my hand is quite steady. It is you who are trembling. I am calm now and relieved, because I have told you. But oh, I am sorry to give you pain.'

"I do not yet understand,' I answered hoarsely.

"He wants me to give up everything and go to him,' she said; but he would not accept my consent until he had explained and made me understand exactly what I was doing. "The world will consider it an immoral thing," he said, "and so it would be if the arrangement were not to be permanent. But any contract which men and women hold to be

binding on themselves should be sufficient now, and will be sufficient again, as it used to be in the old days, provided we can show good cause why any previous contract should be broken. You must believe that, you must be thoroughly satisfied now. For if your conscience were to trouble you afterwards - your troublesome conscience, which keeps you busy regretting nearly everything you do, but never warns you in time to stop you-if you were to have any scruples, then there would be no peace for either of us, and you had better give me up at once."'

"And what did you say, Ideala ?' "I said, perhaps I had. I was beginning to be frightened again.' "And how did it end?'

"He made me go honie and consider.'

"Yes; and what then?' I demanded impatiently.

"And next day he came to me to know my decision-and-and-I was satisfied. I cannot live without him.'

"I groaned aloud. What was I to say? What could I do? An arrangement of this sort is carefully concealed, as a rule, by the people concerned, and denied, if discovered; but here were a lady and gentleman prepared not only to take the step, but to justify it-under somewhat peculiar circumstances certainly-and carefully making their friends acquainted with their intention beforehand, as if it were an ordinary engage

ment."

Of course every inducement this kind friend can bring to bear upon her is produced, for a long time with no effect. Ideala confounds the bishop, who is one of the figures in the background of the picture, and a lawyer who is with him, by asking whether a contract could be valid, one of the parties to which had been kept in ignorance of a most important clause in it? The bishop unsuspecting falls into the trap; but is horrified when she informs him that it is the marriage-contract she means, and can only get out of the dilem

ma by promising to preach on the subject, a promise which does little good to any one. The argument continually renewed is, however, at length brought to a crisis as follows: the whole question has been reasoned over again, and she ends by asserting that her life will be no less pure if she devotes it to her lover, and that nobody but L self can be hurt by the step she takes.

"When things can be legally right though morally wrong,' she says, 'can they not also be morally right though legally wrong?'

you,

"I have clearly tried to show Ideala,' I answered, preparing to go over the old ground again patiently, 'that we none of us stand alone;

that we are all a part of this great system, and that in cases like yours individuals must suffer-must even be sacrificed for the good of the rest. When the sacrifice is voluntary we call it noble.'

"If I go to him I shall have sacrificed a good deal.'

"You will have sacrificed others, not yourself. He is all the world to you, Ideala; the loss would be nothing to the gain,'-she hid her face in her hands, and what is required of you is self-sacrifice. And surely in the end it would be happier for you to give him up now, than to live to feel yourself a millstone round his neck.'

"I do not understand you,' she said, looking up quickly.

"The world, you see, will know nothing of the fine sentiments which made you determine to take this step,' I said. 'You will be spoken of contemptuously, and he will be "the fellow who is living with another man's wife, don't you know," and that will injure him in many ways..

"Do you think so?' she asked anxiously.

" "I know it,' I replied. 'A woman in your position ets an example whether she will or not; and even if all your best reasons for this step were made public, you would do harm by it, for there are only too many people apt enough as it is at finding

spurious excuses for their own shortcomings, who would be glad if they dared to do likewise. And you would not gain your object after all. You would neither be happy yourself nor make Lorrimer happy. People like you are sensitive about their honour -it is the sign of their superiority: and the indulgence of love even at the moment, and under the most favourable circumstances of youth, beauty, and intellectual equality, does not satisfy such natures, if the indulgence be not regulated and sanctified by all that men and women have devised to make their relations moral.'

"This was my last argument, and when I had done she sat there for a long time silent and scarcely breathing.

herself, and I thought it best to leave She was fighting it out with her alone-besides, I had already said would only have irritated her, and all that there was to say; repetition there was nothing now for it but

to wait.