It is much to Miss Hilda Howe’s credit that amid the overwhelming distractions of her most successful London season she never quite abandons these two to the social joys that circle round the Ochterlony Monument and the arid scenic consolations of the Maidan.  Her own experience there is one of the things, I fancy, that make her fond of saying that the stage is the merest cardboard presentation, and that one day she means to leave it, to coax back to her bosom the life which is her heritage in the wider, simpler ways of the world.  She never mentions that experience more directly or less ardently.  But I fear the promise I have quoted is one that she makes too often.