"Reflecting how, at the best, human life on this minute and perishing planet is a mere episode and as brief as a dream."
She has, however, a personal register in one of the characters in "Dangerous Ages." In the final chapter we are told that Pamela has the "key" to the door against which various of the other women bruise their eager hands. The key is not an important job, not a career, nor yet a man, but a philosophic attitude—an attitude of blithe philosophic despair. I will quote a passage which makes a close link between this book and "Told By An Idiot" and "Orphan Island": "Pamela, going about her work, keen, debonair and detached, ironic, cool and quiet, responsive to life and yet a thought disdainful of it, lightly holding and easily renouncing, the world's lover, yet not its servant, her foot at times carelessly on its neck to prove her power over it—Pamela said blandly to grandmama, when the old lady commented one day on her admirable composure, 'Life is so short, you see. Can anything which lasts such a little while be worth making a fuss about?'"
One sees at a glance that Rose Macaulay has flung aside the torch with which Mr. Wells started the Ann Veronicas of 1909 marching toward the earthly kingdom of "God, the Invisible King." She has reverted to a mood nearer the "blithe paganism" of George Moore and Oscar Wilde and old Samuel Butler, with his seductive maxim: "We have all sinned and come short of the glory of making ourselves as comfortable as we easily might have done."
In 1923 she blithely expressed her political disillusion in "A Mystery at Geneva"—not a satire, she assures us in a prefatory note; no, not a satire, but a
