to-morrow without a shadow of regret.  He would be constant, I think, only in his inconstancy to any criterion of present conditions as applicable or likely to be applicable to the future; he sees life as a dynamic thing in process of change and growth.  “All the history of mankind,” he writes, “all the history of life has been and will be the story of something struggling out of the indiscriminated abyss, struggling to exist and prevail over and comprehend individual lives—­an effect of insidious attraction, an idea of invincible appeal.”  And it is for this reason that he is so eager to battle with, annoy, disarrange and reconstruct that rule-of-thumb world he censures so steadily; he is fighting the assumption of a static condition which he knows to be impossible.

And for a moment in The New Machiavelli, and again in his next book, Marriage, he has a passing vision of some greater movement of which we are but the imperfect instruments.  He develops and then drops the idea of a “hinterland,” not only to the individual mind but to the general consciousness.  The “permanent reality,” he calls it, “which is never really immediate, which draws continually upon human experience and influences human action more and more, but which is itself never the actual player upon the stage.  It is the unseen dramatist who never takes a call.”  And in another place he writes in the same connection:  " ... the ideas go on—­as though we are all no more than little cells and corpuscles in some great brain beyond our understanding.”

We come again to a hint of that explanation at the end of Marriage, published in 1912.  The story, reduced to the barest outline, is that of the relations of Trafford to his wife.  It is not complicated by any sexual temptations or jealousies, but it gradually evolves the integral problem of the meaning of life.

Trafford, before his engagement to Marjorie Pope, and for a year or two after his marriage, was engaged in research work.  His speciality was molecular physics and he was a particularly brilliant investigator.  That research, with all the possibilities that it held of some immense discovery of the laws that govern the constitution of inorganic and progressively, perhaps, of organic, matter, was sufficient to engross his mental energies, to give him a sense of satisfaction in life; but his six hundred pounds a year proved insufficient to satisfy the demands of Marjorie’s claim to enjoyment.  She was not a mere type of the worldly-minded woman.  She represents, indeed, the claim of modern women for a distinctive interest and employment not less urgent and necessary than the interests and employments of men.  And when she failed, as she plainly must have failed, to find any such occupation, her sense of beauty and her justifiable demand for life found an outlet largely in shopping, in entertaining, in all such ephemeral attractions and amusements as women in her class may seek and