relishes the "frank sensuality" of "Venus and Adonis." Let us for the present leave the question unanswered. As Mr. Dell presents the incident, it is what is known as an idyllic incident.
I have recited it in some detail because it is a kind of prototypical symbol for Mr. Dell's entire vision of the happy life. It recurs, in one form or another, in each of his four novels. The end of every man's desire, as he sees it, is to be one of two children playing in a secret garret. In "The Briary Bush" the fairy prince and princess find some equivalent for the garret in the artist studios of Chicago, and then there is the actual cottage in the woods where Rose-Ann on her bridal morn bathes in a bank of snow. In "Janet March" the substitute for the shepherd's cottage is again a studio in Greenwich Village. In "This Mad Ideal" there is a little "shack" on the hillside that "nobody knows anything about," where passionate friends talk, read poetry and exchange kisses—innocent and childlike.
Is a lonely dwelling, built by whom or how
None of the rustic island-people know.
·······
This isle and house are mine, and I have vowed
Thee to be lady of the solitude.
Everything that Mr. Delt has to tell us about the summum bonum is in Shelley's "Epipsychidion." So far as I can make out, none of his heroes or heroines conceives of any object higher or more complex or extensive than a solitude à deux with most simple cooking and sleeping apparatus—"all the romantic incon-
