ion.... In that category none was sharper than
the charm of a woman, soon to perish, in a vanity of array as momentary
and iridescent as a May-fly." It is as the poet musing upon the fleet
passage of beauty rather than as the satirist mocking at the vanity of
human wishes that Mr. Hergesheimer traces the career of Linda Condon;
but both poet and satirist meet in his masterpiece.

A woman as lovely as a lyric, she is almost as insensible as a steel
blade or a bright star. The true marvel is that beauty so cold can
provoke such conflagrations. Granted--and certain subtle women decline
to grant it--that Linda with her shining emptiness could have kindled
the passion she kindles in the story, what must be the blackness of her
discovery that when her beauty goes she will have left none of the
generous affection which, had she herself given it through life, she
might by this time have earned in quantities sufficient to endow and
compensate her for old age! Mr. Hergesheimer does not soften the blow
when it comes--he even adds to her agony the clear consciousness that
she cannot feel her plight as more passionate natures might. But he
allows her, at the last, an intimation of immortality. From her
unresponding beauty, she sees, her sculptor lover has caught a madness
eventually sublimated to a Platonic vision which, partially forgetful of
her as an individual, has made him and his works great. Without, in the
common way, modeling her at all, he has snared the essence of her spirit
and has set it--as such mortal things go--everlastingly in bronze.

If Mr. Hergesheimer offers Linda in the end only the hard comfort of a
perception come at largely through her intellect, still as far as the
art of his novel is concerned he has immensely gained by his refusal to
make any trivial concession to natural weaknesses. His latest conclusion
is his best. _The Lay Anthony_ ends in accident, _Mountain Blood_ in
melodrama; _The Three Black Pennys_, more successful than its
predecessors, fades out like the Penny line; _Java Head_ turns sharply
away from its central theme, almost as if _Hamlet_ should concern itself
during a final scene with Horatio's personal perplexities. Now the
conclusions of a novelist are on the whole the test of his judgment and
his honesty; and it promises much for fiction that Mr. Hergesheimer has
advanced so steadily in this respect through his seven books.

He has advanced, too, in his use of decoration, which reached