ation," Conrad has
achieved for women, in these stories of his, an extraordinary
triumph. Well does he name his latest book "Victory." The victory
of women over force, over cunning, over stupidity, over brutality, is
one of the main threads running through all his work.

And what women they are! I do not recall any that resemble them in
all literature.

Less passionate than the women of Dostoievsky, less sentimental
than the women of Balzac, less sensual than the women of de
Maupassant, Conrad's women have a quality entirely their own, a
quality which holds us spell-bound. It is much easier to feel this
quality than to describe it. Something of the same element--and it is
a thing the positivity of which we have to search out among many
crafty negations--may be discerned in some of the women of
Shakespeare and, in a lesser degree, in one or two of the young girls
in the stories of Turgenief.

I think the secret of it is to be looked for in the amazing poise and
self-possession of these women; a self-possession which is indicated
in their moments of withdrawn and reserved silence.

They seem at these times to sink down into the very depths of their
femininity, into the depths of some strange sex-secret of which they
are themselves only dreamily conscious.

They seem to withdraw themselves from their own love, from their
own drama, from their own personality, and to lie back upon life,
upon the universal mystery of life and womanhood. This they do
without, it might seem, knowing what they are doing.

They all, in these strange world-deep silences of theirs, carry upon
their intent and sibylline faces something of that mysterious charm
--expectant, consecrated, and holy--which the early painters have
caught the shadow of in their pictures of the Annunciation.

There is something about them which makes us vaguely dream of
the far-distant youth of the world; something that recalls the
symbolic and poetic figures of Biblical and Mythological legend.

They tease and baffle us with the mystery of their emotions, with the
magical and evasive depths of the feminine secret in them. They
make us think of Rebecca at the well and Ruth in the corn-field; of
Andromache on the walls of Troy and of Calypso, Brunhilda,
Gwenevere, Iphigeneia, Medea, Salome, Lilith.

And all this is achieved by the most subtle and yet by the most
simple means. It is brought about partly by an art of description
which is unique among English novel