Boston, the almost rowdy Boston, the decadent Boston. It is,
of course, a Boston much worse in the report than in the fact, but it
is not unimaginably bad to the student who notes that the lapse from
any high ideals is to a level lower than that of people who have never
had them. As for Petrina herself, who was in Boston more than of it,
she is so admirably analyzed in the chapter devoted to the task that I
am tempted to instance it as the best piece of work in the book, though
it does not make one hold one's breath like some of the dramatic
episodes: "Whatever religious instinct had been in the family had
spent itself at least two generations before her time. She was a
pagan--a tolerant, indifferent, slightly scornful pagan.... But she was
none the less a Puritan. Certain of her ways of thought and habits of
life, had survived the beliefs which had given them birth, as an effect
will often outlive its cause. If she was a pagan, she was a serious
one, a pagan with a New England conscience."

This is mighty well said, and the like things that are said of
Petrina's sister-in-law, who has married an English title, are mighty
well, too. "She had inherited a countenance whose expression was like
the light which lingers in the sky long after sunset--the light of some
ancestral fire gone out. If in her face there were prayers, they had
been said by Pepperells and Vassalls now sleeping in Massachusetts
churchyards. If in her voice there were tears, they had been shed by
those who would weep no more. She mirrored the emotions she had never
felt; and all that was left of joys and sorrows and spiritual
aspirations which had once thrilled human hearts was in that plaintive
echo they had given to this woman's tone, and the light of petition
they had left burning in her eyes."

No one who reads such passages can deny that the author of "Let Not Man
Put Asunder" can think subtly as well as say clearly, and the book
abounds in proofs of his ability to portray human nature in its lighter
aspects. Lady de Bohun, with her pathetic face, is a most amusing
creature, with all her tragedy, and she is on the whole the most
perfectly characterized personality in the story. The author gives you
a real sense of her beauty, her grace, her being always charmingly in a
hurry and always late. The greatest scene is hers: the scene in which
she meets her divorced husband with his second wife. One may suspect
some of the other scenes, but