heroine gives all is not artistic, but personal and specifically erotic, and to a certain extent illicit. Mrs. Forrester is a woman who, as we vulgarly put it, "trades" on her charm, though what she gets in barter is only adoration. She is animated and consumed by the passion for giving and receiving pleasure, which she uses incidentally as a means of refining the manners of those to whom she gives it. Her perfumes, her rings, her furs, her voice, her eyes, her kindness, the touch of her fine hand upon one's arm are all bewitching, penetratively seductive. She cannot bow or give one a passing glance without establishing a personal relation of an indescribable sweetness.
Mrs. Forrester is the radiant Venus Anadyomene united in the holy bonds of matrimony to an honorable, crippled, corpulent, big-jowled railway man who looks and acts like Grover Cleveland. She is, in her own sense, unflinchingly loyal to this fine old wreck. But that is not enough for her. She is in her sense loyal to all men. She gives the best of herself to them all, and so she fascinates all men, and all boys, who come within reach of her voice and eyes. Personal charm is her one talent. In all circumstances, worthy and unworthy, she lives out its potentialities. She uses it as the musician uses music, to expand the allotted interval; and, like a public performer of music, she wishes to please all.
At the first reading of this book I did not lose my heart to Mrs. Forrester. I happen to have a deeply seated, perhaps ineradicable, prejudice against persons who desire to please everybody. Mrs. Forrester's passion for pleasing everybody left her, I thought, without that trait which is essential to pleasing people who are at all particular: it left her without discrimi-
