imaginatively into the circumstances, she would not consider Soames's act a crime. If so, she would challenge the idea of chastity. Perhaps she would call the act "a heinous unchastity"; but that would be to abandon our definition.
I was a bit shocked last spring when someone remarked that May Sinclair had joined the ranks of those who are writing primarily to engage the attention of Mr. Sumner; and that Ann Severn and the Fieldings is an "immoral book." I recalled her Divine Fire as one of the keen delights of twenty years ago, and I remembered her recently published Mr. Waddington of Wyck as the most exhilarating and remorseless flaying alive of the philanderer that I had ever witnessed.
I read Ann Severn and the Fieldings, and I found it, especially in its last two or three chapters, a love story of poignant and thrilling beauty. Compared with many of the physiologically and pathologically introspective novels of the day it is, despite its exhibition of a neurosis resulting in false angina pectoris, almost an old-fashioned love story. It is almost old-fashioned in presenting, in the case of Ann, a passion as straight, as single, as unswerving, as unflinching as that of Shakespeare's Juliet. Ann, brought up with the three
