is handled by Miss West in a long novel the chapters of which
are a series of delineative emotions. I do not mean that Miss West shrinks
from externalised action, as did Henry James whom she has admired and
studied. She perceives the immense value of introspection, but is not lost
in its quicksands. She can devote a whole chapter to a train of thought in
the mind of Ellen Melville, sitting inattentively at a public meeting; and
she can follow it with another long chapter giving the sequence of
thoughts in the mind of Richard Yaverland; and she can bring each chapter
to a period with the words: "She (he) glanced across the hall. Their eyes
met." It might be thought that this constitutes a waste of narrative
space; not so. As a matter of fact, without the insight accorded by these
disclosures of things thought and felt, we should be unable to understand
the behaviour of these two young people.

All the first half of the book is a truly marvelous story of young lovers;
all the latter end of the book is a relation scarcely paralleled in
fiction of the conflict between the mother's claim and the claim of the
younger woman.

Of subsidiary portraits there are plenty. Ellen's mother and Mr. Mactavish
James and Mr. Philip James are like full-lengths by Velasquez. In the
closing chapters of the book we have the extraordinary figure of the
brother and son, Roger, accompanied by the depressing girl whom he has
picked up the Lord knows where.

And, after all, this is not a first novel--that promise, which so often
fails of fulfilment--but a second novel; and I have in many a day not read
anything that seemed to me to get deeper into the secrets of life than
this study of a man who, at the last, spoke triumphantly, "as if he had
found a hidden staircase out of destiny," and a woman who, at the last,
"knew that though life at its beginning was lovely as a corn of wheat it
was ground down to flour that must make bitter bread between two human
tendencies, the insane sexual caprice of men, the not less mad excessive
steadfastness of women."

BOOKS BY REBECCA WEST

THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER
THE JUDGE

SOURCES ON REBECCA WEST

Who's Who. [In England].

Rebecca West: Article by Amy Wellington in the LITERARY REVIEW OF THE NEW
YORK EVENING POST, 1921.

Articles by Rebecca West in various English publications, frequently
reprinted by THE LIVING AGE. See the READERS' GUIDE TO PERIODICAL
LITERATURE.

CHAPTER VI

SHAMELESS