their common
determination to be free. Charming slaves of liberty! Felix is at heart
a Puritan and cannot take the world lightly, as it comes. His blunders
bruise and wound him. He punishes himself for all his vagaries. Rose-Ann
is not a Puritan, but she too has instincts that will not surrender, any
more than Felix's, to the doctrines which they both profess: jealousy
sleeps within her, and potential motherhood. She and Felix come to feel
that they have shirked life by their deliberate childlessness and that
life has deserted them. Yet separation proves unendurable. So they
resume marriage, vowing "not to be afraid of life or of any of the
beautiful things life may bring." Among these, of course, are to be
children and a house.

Is this merely a return to their villages, merely domestic
sentimentalism in a lovely guise? Mr. Dell has gone a little too deep to
incur the full suspicion. He has got very near to the biological
foundations of two lives, where, for the moment, he rests his case.
There is more to come, however, in this spiritual history, whether
Felix Fay knows it or not. Let the house be built and the children be
born, and Felix and Rose-Ann, though citizens and parents, will still be
individuals and will still have to find out whether these complicated
threads of loyalty last better than the simple threads which broke.
Felix, in discovering the lure of stability, has not necessarily
completed the circle of his life. Freedom may allure him again.

_The Briary-Bush_, less varied than _Moon-Calf_, is decidedly
profounder. It hovers over the dark waters of the unconscious on perhaps
the surest wings an American novel has ever used. Though it has probed
difficult natures and knows them thoroughly it does not flaunt its
knowledge but brings it in only when it can throw some revealing light
upon the outward perplexities of the lovers. Thus it gives depth and
timbre to the story, and yet allows the characters to seem actual
persons actually walking the world. At the same time, Mr. Dell does not
possess a too vivid sense of externality. In both his novels all facts
come through the mist of Felix's habitual confusion, and in that mist
they lose dramatic emphasis; muted, they are not able to break up the
agreeable monotone in which the narrative is delivered. But underneath
these surfaces, seen so poetically, there is a substantial bulk of human
life, immemorial folkways powerfully contending with the new rebellion
o