article I should have written about this book if it had come to
me for review. 'But it couldn't have come to me,' I reflected, 'for
myself and the young man that wrote it were not contemporaries.' It
would be true, however, to say that our lives overlapped; but when did
the author of the _Drama in Muslin_ disappear from literature? His next
book was _Confession of a Young Man_. It was followed by _Spring Days_;
he must have died in the last pages of that story, for we find no trace
of him in _Esther Waters_! And my thoughts, dropping away from the books
he had written, began to take pleasure in the ridiculous appearance that
the author of _A Drama in Muslin_ presented in the mirrors of Dublin
Castle as he tripped down the staircases in parly morning. And a smile
played round my lips as I recalled his lank yellow hair (often standing
on end), his sloping shoulders and his female hands--a strange
appearance which a certain vivacity of mind sometimes rendered engaging.

He was writing at that time _A Mummer's Wife_ in his bedroom at the
Shelbourne Hotel, and I thought how different were the two visions, _A
Mummer's Wife_ and _A Drama in Muslin_ and how the choice of these two
subjects revealed him to me. 'It was life that interested him rather
than the envelope' I said. 'He sought Alice Barton's heart as eagerly as
Kate Ede's;' and my heart went out to the three policemen to whose
assiduities I owed this pleasant evening, all alone with my cat and my
immediate ancestor; and as I sat looking into the fire I fell to
wondering how it was that the critics of the 'eighties could have been
blind enough to dub him an imitator of Zola. 'A soul searcher, if ever
there was one,' I continued, 'whose desire to write well is apparent on
every page, a headlong, eager, uncertain style (a young hound yelping at
every trace of scent), but if we look beneath the style we catch sight
of the young man's true self, a real interest in religious questions and
a hatred as lively as Ibsen's of the social conventions that drive women
into the marriage market. It seems strange,' I said, abandoning myself
to recollection, 'that the critics of the 'eighties failed to notice
that the theme of _A Drama in Muslin_ is the same as that of the _Doll's
House_; the very title should have pointed this put to them.' But they
were not interested in themes; but in morality, and how they might crush
a play which, if it were uncrushed by them, would succeed in underm