One of the commonest headings in the notebooks on which Charles Reade founded his novels is fœmina vera. He considered himself an authority on woman. In a letter to the Pall Mall Gazette he calls himself “a patient drudge, who has studied that sex profoundly in various walks of life.” Certainly his women are more memorable, and the subject of more comment and criticism, than his men. To them W. D. Howells devoted a long essay in his Heroines of Fiction. Though, like his men, they fall into easily recognizable, frequently repeated types, they are more alive, more real, less subordinate to the demands of story structure. The result of more study and more enthusiasm, they are less romanticized, less melodramatized than his heroes and villains.