straying this time. It is the "Cytherea" motive - the man of forty seeking his true mate. His wife, naturally, isn't his mate. But by the peculiar irony of circumstances he discovers that his wife is his mate, and that he even owes his business advancement to her tact and charm. As a matter of fact he had already found his Cytherea, entangled himself with her, only to experience a sudden reversal within himself which exhibited his wife as the real thing after all. And he knew that it was real things, not smocks and sardines and spurious good spirits, which he wanted.

A little child leads them in Corinne Updegraff Wells's "Bobbie's Roof" (Designer, March). Anne Davenport was preparing to marry Rodney Blauvelt. Rodney had been divorced from his wife for a long time, and Anne knew that she could be a good mother to Rodney's little Bobbie. But there came a critical illness of childhood. It was pitifully evident that so far as Bobbie was concerned Anne was inadequate. What he needed was his real mamma. Out of his need arose the conflict in Anne between love and duty which is the nub of the story. Duty won, as it should in all well regulated stories, and Anne sacrificed her happiness to insure Bobbie's.

Grace Sartwell Mason, like Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, has the faculty for writing very good or very bad stories. However, "The Gray Spell" (Saturday Evening Post, March 28) falls outside this generalization. It is a story of conflicting temperaments and the marital adjustments they imposed upon Ethan and Alvira Pell, and it achieves a moderate success by virtue of its fidelity to human truth. The homiletic element is held in abeyance, for Mrs. Mason is more of an artist than a moralist.

In lighter mood, Viola Brothers Shore relates the business of marriage to the electrical contracting business in "The Deputy Husband" (Woman's Home Companion, February). This story shows that if a woman is clever, takes an interest in a man's work, makes tangible contributions to it, there will be no time, no inclination, for excursions into the shadowland with the unattached "deputy" mates in which our civilization is so prolific. It is Carlyle's gospel of work brought up to date, and down to the practical exigencies of getting somewhere in the world.

Lillian Day conveys something of the same gospel of progress in "BriefCase Men" (Holland's, February). Any bright young couple in the lower levels of society can elevate themselves if they watch their step and pull together, says Miss Day, and she tells of the J. Roscoe Budds who kept their eyes and ears open. They learned to wear the right clothes, use the right stationery, say the right things. They read the right books, cultivated the right habits of thought, studied the right models as they presented themselves. Peg by peg the Budds advanced in money and position. We leave them still going strong, and we know that they reached their hearts' desire.

Innocuous people, the Budds, but symptomatic of the direction progress too often takes in our restless democracy. Culture imposed from without, a full and satisfactory life to be achieved by imitation and the shrewd application of rules of thumb that is the practice and the philosophy of the J. Roscoe Budds. One may believe that their program, admirable though it be for its indomitable energy and hustle, can produce only an incomplete and unsatisfactory humanism; but, do

the Budds know it? Miss Day doesn't tell us. Such other authorities as Sinclair Lewis and Stuart Sherman have offered as yet only tentative and highly qualified answers.

This whole group of stories may be said to have little enough to do with the art of the short story. That is true indeed. But it has a great deal to do with the practice of the short story. Heavy with sentiment, portentous with warning and admonition for the reader, this didactic vein runs through our current fiction to a degree which has seldom been recognized. In spite of Keats and Shelley, the Eighteen Nineties, the young intellectuals, and the materialistic and relativist philosophies, the conviction persists that art has a moral purpose.

It is to be regretted, then, that so few of the good writers are on the side of the angels. Ethical values have a way of cropping out most convincingly when the writer handles his material most artistically. It would help our art (it assuredly would not hurt our morals) to come occasionally upon a wife who regretted her wavering allegiance too late, a warring pair whose marital adjustments were complex and something less than perfection. There is a dualism in human nature which cries out for honest treatment, a complexity to human desire which can become a criticism of life only when it is allowed to run its natural course.

The outstanding stories of the three months under consideration-February, March, and April are "Six Dollars" by W. D. Steele (Pictorial Review, March) and "Blocker Locke" by Barry Benefield (Century, February). Here again, against his favorite background of a New England fishing community, Mr. Steele builds a story in which an authentic character be

comes vividly clear, and in which the action grows naturally out of the attributes of that character. "Six Dollars" is the story of a liaison, and of what a man's conscience did to him for many decades thereafter. All he had ever given the girl was six dollars, and with that she had bought a lamp to guide him back. For thirty years she kept it lit for him. For thirty years he saw it and was fascinated, tortured, molded by the secret power it held over him. When the lamp finally went out he had to go to seek the reason why. She was dead. The lamp - a handsome and pretentious

one

had been polished and burnished as though it enshrined the very flame of love. And the tag was still on it; it just said "$6". This is romantic, yes, but a terrible God seeks a lifelong expiation for youthful error, and the story itself is made from the very qualities inherent in the character of the protagonist. That is why it drives so powerfully and unerringly at its mark. Mr. Steele has never handled his medium more flawlessly.

Blocker Locke, the hero of Mr. Benefield's story, rebelled against an unwritten law. His story is the simple and tragic narrative of heterodoxy and its consequences. Blocker was a stone worker in a marble yard. He was very fond of his two boys. When Carrie, his wife, ran away with the night telegraph operator, Blocker was in a dilemma. He knew the conventions of Arkansas society. But he didn't feel like raging and shooting. He felt like opening a bottle of champagne though that is not the way he would have expressed it. The community, however, was not to be cheated so easily of its drama. Officious people supplied him with firearms and information. During his period of inactivity Blocker experienced every

shade of slur, sneer, and open insult. They finally goaded him to murder in the dark, in the tiny house he knew Carrie and Mat had taken in Little Rock.

"They're satisfied now, I reckon."

And then, raising his eyes, he saw that he knew neither of the dead. Mat and Carrie had moved.

"Thank God for that!" he breathed. "Jim and Little One will be glad."

John Galsworthy is frequently most brilliant and powerful, if not most pleasant, in studying a type of character in process of decay, and that is what he does in "The Last Card" (Red Book, February). It is Galsworthy in his most clinical, realistic vein a minute, almost cruel picture of a woman at forty six assembling threadbare powers of seduction for a last great play for what? Not, most assuredly, for the thing young girls want when they leave home incontinently. What the adventuress in Mr. Galsworthy's story wanted was security, decency, inner cleanliness, a protection that was not furtive in short, the assured position of a respectable woman.

The technical brilliance of Conrad Aiken's "The Last Visit" (Dial, April) approaches that of Mr. Galsworthy's story. It is equally meticulous, a little bit morbid, and certainly more frigid. There is no supreme dramatic crisis, either subjective or external, in a young matron's paying a visit to a dying grandmother, making an early escape, and keeping an assignation in a vaudeville theatre with a man whose relationship to her seems one likely to precipitate still another story, though one which Mr. Aiken does not tell. But there is a high literary skill in the way Mr. Aiken brings the decay and dissolution of age into juxtaposition with the passionate, centrifugal forces

of youth. The ending is a little perverse. It has mood and feeling, but it is not clearly defined.

We have had portraits enough of the poor harried wife of a cheap, tippling husband. Repetition in print, from the rostrum, and in the movies has made it both a literary and a social convention. From Sheila Kaye-Smith, who is no propagandist, we have an unprejudiced version of the theme in "A Working Man's Wife" (Woman's Home Companion, March). The story has action, plot, suspense, surprise, in excellent degree, but as a subjective study of a real woman whose eyes are on the hills, the story speaks with the very accent of poignant truthfulness.

Age, which is only the foil for youth in the story by Mr. Aiken, becomes protagonist in Zona Gale's "The Dime" (Century, April). There is youth in this story, the extreme youth of Jeffrey Copper, aged six years. But the central figure is Grandfather Tarkoff, who had come to America when he was nine and had been here ever since eighty years. This is the tale of his latter end, his feebleness, his wistfulness, his uncouth awkwardness, his interminable anecdotes of the days when there was sap in him, and of his dime the first dime he had ever made, the one he still proudly displayed. No one listened any more except little Jeffrey. It was through the rapt attention of the little boy that the old man did his living. It was his one contact with life, his one reason for going on. But the inevitable day came when he lost even little Jeffrey. Then the old fellow quietly went out and drowned himself in the canal.

There is the indefeasible texture of reality in this. The comments of the bereaved relatives and friends at the funeral are monuments to the distance which separates one human being from

another, and one generation from another. Miss Gale is not hard or brittle in her handling of this theme. But she knows that we all walk alone, and that it is not only precocious genius which is misunderstood by a careless and unfeeling world.

A. R. Leach, a new writer, and author of "A Captain Out of Etruria" (Harper's, April) has triumphed over a group of stock characters, a trite scene, and a genre of fiction which has always been somewhat thin and trivial — I mean, the theme of the transplanted American society of the capitals of Europe. You will recognize the characters: an American woman artist with a touch of genius and a passion for people and motives, a young man of acute and sophisticated sensibilities, and a wealthy, newly rich American woman with a fragile, pretty, bewildered daughter in attendance. The latter two had come, of course, to ornament a society which was, tragically enough, quite uninterested in them. It sounds like farce or caricature. But it isn't. Miss Leach succeeds in individualizing her characters, she achieves real nuance, and gives a surprise ending to boot! It is a fair one, too.

Mrs. Wharton occasionally gratifies an interest outside the world which her admirers have assigned to her as peculiarly her own preserve. One of her occasional interests is New England. Another is the nebulous realm of witchcraft, old racial superstitions and dreads, the agonies of a mediæval religion. Such of her stories as "Kerfol", "The Hermit and the Wild Woman", "Afterward", and "The Lady's Maid's Bell" serve as illustrations. Both of these interests are present in "Bewitched" (Pictorial Review, March). The scene is New England in the grip of winter; the charac

ters as grim and frigid as the season. Saul Rutledge is "haunted" by Ora Brand. At Mrs. Rutledge's request a quiet committee sits upon the matter and all the cloudy superstitions of the men and women who burned the witches at Salem rise in the cry of the formidable Mrs. Rutledge:

"A stake through the breast! That's the old way, and it's the only way. The Deacon knows it!"

But they do not drive a stake through the breast of the dead girl. A series of bewildering and mysterious events occur which bring rest to Saul Rutledge and to the community. Mrs. Wharton's chief excellence here lies in the picture she gives of a communal state of mind, and the significance with which she endows it. A complete rational and realistic solution is not offered, so that the reader is left balanced between a matter-of-fact and a mystical explanation of what really happened to Saul Rutledge.

I cannot explain "V. Lydiat” (Atlantic, February) by L. Adams Beck, and Mr. Beck does not wish to. It is a frankly mystical story, dealing with the extraordinary conjunction of two personalities whereby a stream of amazing fiction concerning India and the Orient was given to the world. It is also the story of how that stream of fiction ceased to flow forever. There is no solution offered for the whole thing, even less clue given than in Mrs. Wharton's story. But the meticulous skill with which the atmosphere of Eastern faith and philosophy is created and substantiated until one accepts the fantastical as plausible and true, is notable.

There are several Booth Tarkingtons. The best one, the Tarkington of "Alice Adams", wrote ""Thea Zell" (Red Book, April), the story of the rise and fall of the belle of a midland

city whose name, one surmises, might conceivably be Indianapolis. 'Thea Zell was reared by her mother to be a dainty show animal, and she ran true to breeders' form; she had no brains. But Thea Zell had exquisiteness and temperament and vanity, so she ran away from her husband upon the night of her local dramatic triumph, away to the fabled city where the lights are brighter and success comes without stint to the deserving.

That was 'Thea Zell's great mistake. She had only her beauty, and years and years of one night stands took care of that. At the end of the story, when "Thea's dissolution has gone pretty

far, Mr. Tarkington returns her to her old environment, to complete the contrast between her life and that of the sister and the children she had left behind her.

It is not a pretty moment, though a powerful one, I think. Mr. Tarkington's simple, vernacular way of conducting a narrative is not the less artistic because it is apparently homely and artless in style and structure. 'Thea Zell is the perennial figure of the erring wife, middle class, middle western, broken by the fatal lure of the street which, according to one of our national ballads, has a broken heart for every light upon it.