Page:Marie Corelli - the writer and the woman (IA mariecorelliwrit00coat).pdf/179

 *tions give her, but that she has the power that justifies her bravery! The book is a grand and successful attempt to show how women who are good and true hold the affection, the esteem, the devotion, the homage of men; it is an incentive to women to be in men's regard the Good Angels that men best love to believe them; it is a lesson to women how to attain the noblest heights of womanhood.

As Marie Corelli, in discussing the "Modern Marriage Market," has said, "Follies, temptations, and hypocrisies surround, in a greater or less degree, all women, whether in society or out of it; and we are none of us angels, though, to their credit be it said, some men still think us so. Some men still make 'angels' out of us, in spite of our cycling mania, our foolish 'clubs,'—where we do nothing at all,—our rough games at football and cricket, our general throwing to the winds of all dainty feminine reserve, delicacy, and modesty,—and we alone are to blame if we shatter their ideals and sit down by choice in the mud when they would have placed us on thrones."

The woman who reads and studies "The Sorrows of Satan" will desire to attain the angel ideal; and the lesson will be the better learned by the reading of this book because of the appalling picture of Lady Sibyl Elton, whose callousness and whose fin-de-*