ught. Yet the
name Karin Michaelis is no pseudonym; the writer really is of the same
sex as her heroine Elsie Lindtner.

Is not this an added reason for the curiosity which this book awakens?
The most sincere and complete, the humblest and most moving of feminine
confessions proceeds from one of those Northern women, whom we Latin
races are pleased to imagine as types of immaterial candour, sovereign
"intellectuality," and glacial temperament--souls in harmony with their
natural surroundings, the rigid pine forests and snow-draped heathlands
of Scandinavia.

A Scandinavian woman! Immediately the words evoke the chaste vision sung
by Leconte de Lisle, in his poem "l'Epiphanie":

Elle passe, tranquille, en un reve divin,
Sur le bord du plus frais de tes lacs, o Norvege!
Le sang rose et subtil qui dore son col fin
Est doux comme un rayon de l'aube sur la neige.

Quand un souffle furtif glisse en ses cheveux blonds,
Une cendre ineffable inonde son epaule,
Et, de leur transparence argentant leurs cils longs,
Ses yeux out la couleur des belle nuits du pole.

Et le gardien pensif du mystique oranger
Des balcons de l'Aurore eternelle se penche,
Et regarde passer ce fantome leger
Dans les plis de sa robe immortellement blanche.

"Immortellement blanche!" Very white indeed!... Read the intimate
journal of Elsie Lindtner, written precisely by the side of one of these
fresh Northern lakes. Possibly at eighteen Elsie Lindtner may have
played at "Epiphanies" and filled "the pensive guardian of the mystic
orange tree" with admiration. But it is at forty-two that she begins to
edit her private diary, and her eyes that "match the hue of polar
nights" have seen a good deal in the course of those twenty years. And
if in the eyes of the law she has remained strictly faithful to her
marriage vows, she has judged herself in the secret depths of her heart.
She has also judged other women, her friends and confidants. The moment
of "the crisis" arrives, and, taking refuge in "a savage solitude," in
which even the sight of a male servant is hateful to her, she sets down
with disconcerting lucidity all she has observed in other women, and in
herself. These other women are also of the North: Lillie Rothe, Agatha
Ussing, Astrid Bagge, Margarethe Ernst, Magna Wellmann.... Her memory
invokes them all, and they reappear. We seem to take part in a strange,
painful revel; a witches' revel of ardent yet wither