when he found she had fooled
him. The scene in the studio, where the dead painter lies in his
coffin, between Mildred and his mistress--a model from the "lower"
ranks of life--is one of the most stirring in modern fiction. The
"lady" comes off second-best; when she begins to stammer that she
hoped the dead man hadn't suggested improper relations, the unhappy
girl turns on her: "I dare say you were virtuous more or less, as far
as your own body is concerned. Faugh! women like you make virtue seem
odious." Mildred, indignant at such "low conversation," makes her
escape, slightly elated at the romantic crisis. A real man has died
for her sake. After all, life is not so barren of interest.

She goes to Paris. Studies art. Returns to London. Again to Paris and
the forest of Fontainebleau, where she joins a student colony and
flirts with a young painter; but it all comes to nothing, just as her
work in the Julian Studio has no artistic result. Mr. Moore, who is a
landscape-painter, has drawn a capital picture of the forest, though
not with the fulness of charm to be found in Flaubert's treatment of
the same theme in Sentimental Education. The little tale is a genuine
contribution to fiction in which art is adequately dealt with. When
Celibates appeared, Henry Harland said that Mildred Lawson was worthy
of Flaubert if it had been written in good English, which is a
manifest epigram. The volume is a perfect breviary of selfishness.

Tiring of art, Mildred takes up society, though she gets into a rather
dubious Paris set. A socialist deputy and his wife protect her and she
becomes a brilliant contributor--at least so she is made to
believe--to a publication in which is eventually sunk a lot of her
money. Her brother has warned her, but to no avail. At this juncture
the tale becomes slightly mysterious. Mildred flirts with the deputy,
his wife is apparently willing--having an interest elsewhere--and
suddenly the bottom drops out of the affair, and Mildred poorer, also
wiser, returns to her home in England. She has embraced the Roman
Catholic religion, but you do not feel she is sincerely pious. It is
one more gesture in her sterile career. At the end we find her trying
to evade the inevitable matrimony, for she is alone, her brother
dead, and she an heiress. Suspicious of her suitor's motives--it is
the same faithful Alfred--she wearily debates the situation: "Her
nerves were shattered, and life grows terribly distinct in the