ing its young; the cold girl warming herself by male catastrophe; the erotic friendship, drawn out and frustrated; "Festus like a thin rod incapable of evasion or compromise or the least adaptation," intolerably a suicide; the final reckoning of the friends—Homeric waste and slaughter, needless, pitiful: it draws from her no remark. The theme is a "hard, bright and sweet" male reality wasted and wounded by old female instincts, not swiftly enough altered to a new order—unrequired and perverted. The story is not as perfect as later ones will be; but they also may present no solution and no surcease.
For her work is an irresponsible evocation; the first and strangest resource of the human intellect, and, in our literature, longest in abeyance. Of all forms of utterance, narrative, the description of a mobile cluster of experiences, is the least easily comprehensible; the contrary appears to be true only because debased romancers have too long imitated a redundant theatre. The latter's devotees are bound to find "that which is done" in these stories much overlaid by that which merely is, the plot by something as displeasing as poetry. Their demands are in fashion; but fine writers have always differed from petty by understanding that the relation between experiencing itself and mere events is exactly that between the music and text of an opera.
As to mechanics and her system of speech, she combines a minimum of linear fluency with a maximum of swift continuity in emotion. Each movement or image stands out crisply, in full relief; intermediate phrases have been cut away. Very rarely her meaning depends on grammatical relations which take place in the ellipsis, and a part is lost. The eye does not predominate, and analogies are not made to prolong its portion of experience; but to illustrate or to probe into meaning: "A huge motor gauntlet like a dead animal." This prose is not something stretched between one mind and another, a mere telephone wire; it has weight and substance, "definitely an object of whatever shape lying upon the paper" (Dr Williams). In the dialogue, work of genius, the obliqueness of talk, its wide palette of meanings, are used with brevity and elegance; the violent atmospheres, the muscular haste, the sensual tints, the symbols and diagrams are handled with the balance of Congreve. The rhythm is subtle, short fluent jets retarded by spondaic forms. Never unnoticeable, it keeps the intellect nervous and
