‘E.M. Forster warms the teapot well enough,’ said Katherine Mansfield (she had just finished reading Howard's End), ‘ but he does not put in the tea.’ How aptly this sentence defines and relegates our clever (in the worst sense of the word) too clever women novelists, so sensitive to the charms of nature and of art, of human relationships and of animal favourites, so obtuse, so stupid in the vicinity of sin! The demoralised, de-Christianised novel—when the writer has listened deferentially to her inspirer’s Eriiis sicut Dece—bears witness to the absurdities of living without God, or rather in defiance of Him and His known laws.

‘Religion is like adenoids. We have read Freud and Havelock Ellis. We say “syncopated,” not “ragtime” like our elders nor “jazz” like the herd. There is no harm except pain.’ We see and touch in ‘Helen and Felicia (by E. B. C. Jones; Chatto and Windus, 1927) the blight of the author’s immoral theories destroying the vitality of the characters skilfully evoked. Remove chastity from the virtues, exalt conceit, and then write Helen and Felicia. In her Inigo Sandys Miss Jones had attacked, in the most ladylike way, a redoubtable situation; but her Inigo had not been able to give Charles what he wanted : her rashness has grown with the impurity of the modern novel, and her Helen serenely offers her husband to her younger sister, not out of Pandarus perversity, but because she is so fond of both. Eriiis sicut Dece, surely, surely. Rosamond Lehmann at least had left her Judith pondering on Dusty Answers. E. B. C. Jones with less charm, less atmosphere, more experience, has not dared to look beyond the triumph of the three adversaries of the soul.