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O a man," says an engaging cynic in Mr. Stephen McKenna's "Sonia," "sex is an incident: to a woman it is everything in this world and in the next"; a generalization which a novelist can always illustrate with a heroine who meets his views. We have had many such women in recent fiction, and it takes some discernment to perceive that in them sex seems everything, only because honour and integrity and fair-mindedness are nothing. They are not swept by emotions good or bad; but when all concern for other people's rights and privileges is eliminated, a great deal of room is left for the uneasy development of appetites which may be called by any name we like.

Among the Georgian and early-Victorian novelists, Richardson alone