that they are consoling and edifying. When Mary Fairthorne
begins to scold her cousin, Kitty Morrow, at the party where she finds
Kitty wearing her dead mother's pearls, and even takes hold of her in a
way that makes the reader hope she is going to shake her, she is
delightful; and when Kitty complains that Mary has "pinched" her, she
is adorable. One is really in love with her for the moment; and in
that moment of nature the thick air of good society seems to blow away
and let one breathe freely. The bad people in the book are better than
the good people, and the good people are best in their worst tempers.
They are so exclusively well born and well bred that the fitness of the
medical student, Blount, for their society can be ascertained only by
his reference to a New England ancestry of the high antiquity that can
excuse even dubious cuffs and finger-nails in a descendant of good
principles and generous instincts.

The psychological problem studied in the book with such artistic
fineness and scientific thoroughness is personally a certain Mrs.
Hunter, who manages through the weak-minded and selfish Kitty Morrow to
work her way to authority in the household of Kitty's uncle, where she
displaces Mary Fairthorne, and makes the place odious to all the kith
and kin of Kitty. Intellectually, she is a clever woman, or rather,
she is a woman of great cunning that rises at times to sagacity; but
she is limited by a bad heart and an absence of conscience. She is
bold up to a point, and then she is timid; she will go to lengths, but
not to all lengths; and when it comes to poisoning Fairthorne to keep
him from changing his mind about the bequest he has made her, she has
not quite the courage of her convictions. She hesitates and does not
do it, and it is in this point she becomes so aesthetically successful.
The guilt of the uncommitted crimes is more important than the guilt of
those which have been committed; and the author does a good thing
morally as well as artistically in leaving Mrs. Hunter still something
of a problem to his reader. In most things she is almost too plain a
case; she is sly, and vulgar, and depraved and cruel; she is all that a
murderess should be; but, in hesitating at murder, she becomes and
remains a mystery, and the reader does not get rid of her as he would
if she had really done the deed. In the inferior exigencies she
strikes fearlessly; and when the man who has divorced her looms up in
h