er horizon with doom in his presence, she goes and makes love to him.
She is not the less successful because she disgusts him; he agrees to
let her alone so long as she does no mischief; she has, at least, made
him unwilling to feel himself her persecutor, and that is enough for
her.

Mrs. Hunter is a study of extreme interest in degeneracy, but I am not
sure that Kitty Morrow is not a rarer contribution to knowledge. Of
course, that sort of selfish girl has always been known, but she has
not met the open recognition which constitutes knowledge, and so she
has the preciousness of a find. She is at once tiresome and vivacious;
she is cold-hearted but not cold-blooded, and when she lets herself go
in an outburst of passion for the celibate young ritualist, Knellwood,
she becomes fascinating. She does not let herself go without having
assured herself that he loves her, and somehow one is not shocked at
her making love to him; one even wishes that she had won him. I am not
sure but the case would have been a little truer if she had won him,
but as it is I am richly content with it. Perhaps I am the more
content because in the case of Kitty Morrow I find a concession to
reality more entire than the case of Mrs. Hunter. She is of the
heredity from which you would expect her depravity; but Kitty Morrow,
who lets herself go so recklessly, is, for all one knows, as well born
and as well bred as those other Philadelphians. In my admiration of
her, as a work of art, however, I must not fail of justice to the
higher beauty of Mary Fairthorne's character. She is really a good
girl, and saved from the unreality which always threatens goodness in
fiction by those limitations of temper which I have already hinted.

V.

It is far from the ambient of any of these imaginary lives to that of
the half-caste heroine of "A Japanese Nightingale" and the young
American whom she marries in one of those marriages which neither the
Oriental nor the Occidental expects to last till death parts them. It
is far, and all is very strange under that remote sky; but what is true
to humanity anywhere is true everywhere; and the story of Yuki and
Bigelow, as the Japanese author tells it in very choice English, is of
as palpitant actuality as any which should treat of lovers next door.
If I have ever read any record of young married love that was so frank,
so sweet, so pure, I do not remember it. Yet, Yuki, though she loves
Bigelow, does not