and, like all women's painters, selfishly devoted to his art and subordinating to it all the tender and gracious experiences of life. There is an effort at depicting Graham as the easy master of rather heroic qualities: his very speech is intended to suggest a half-knightly quality of mind, which makes him seem to bend to woman while he actually holds himself above and beyond her influence. He nevertheless yields to the charm of Millicent, and they become lovers. The rest of the story we could hardly tell, for it contains much strange matter. Joy and hope and love raise Millicent into altitudes she had never dreamed of winning again, for already her life had been shattered into fragments by a painful history. She has, in fact, gone through too much sorrow, too much disillusion, not to have a heart and body too sensitive to endure fresh blows. Graham puts her aside that his career as an artist may not be impeded by his love for her, and just when he finds that, after all,
It was not song that taught me love,
But it was love which taught me song,
Millicent dies. There is much that is neither sound nor sane in the ideals of the book, and, taken in detail, there are points to be derided and condemned. Millicent's past history is more than unfortunate, since a woman who enters into a secret marriage cuts the ground from under her own feet, and ought not to complain if she finds no substantial hold in life. Millicent is, besides, a spoiled child, an egotist, and much that she essays and proclaims is vague and foolish. But, as we have already said, there is a freshness and spontaneity about the work which give it worth, and seem to promise much for the writer if she will study methods and not only enlarge and enrich but discipline her ideas and experience.
"The Crime of Henry Vane" is, no doubt, the fashionable crime of the period. But some of the heavier causes of human misery, like financial ruin, domestic unhappiness, or insanity, are apt to lie behind the tragedy, and cause men, without any of the eloquent arguments of a Cato or a Hamlet, to cut short their lives with the modern substitute for the "bare bodkin." "Men have died and worms have eaten them, but not for love," is as true as in Shakespeare's time; and even the proof that a man has committed suicide after a woman has refused him is not enough to make us believe he cut off his career for purely romantic reasons. Such a catastrophe needs an interpreting fact, like inherited madness, even more than the death of a defaulter or an insolvent debtor. And Henry Vane was no doubt a little mad from his twenty-first birthday, which ushered in for him a series of heavy calamities,—his rejection by his first love, loss of his only sister, his father's financial reverses, followed by his death and the consequent hopeless insanity of his mother. The story has to do with the young man's retrieval of his father's fortune, which is effected by one of those pleasing but purely chimerical processes that dazzle the imagination and make us wish that the secret of the miracle might have been imparted to the promoters of the various collapsed railroads that make a net-work over the United States at the present epoch. But why dwarf Henry Vane's heroic achievements? At the age of twenty-five or so he had not only paid all his father's creditors in full, but had made a fortune for himself of a million and a half. Few follies had interfered with his close application to business, and his sole recreation had been the study of mediæval history and Italian poetry. He had had time to recover from his early love, and it might have seemed that, once freed from the despotism of a fixed idea of making enough money to keep his unfortunate mother from want, he would have fallen sensibly and heartily in love. Like too many of the heroes of novels of the present day, however, he had gone through the disease of the age, and it was impossible for him to fall sensibly and heartily in love. Still, he was attracted to a certain degree by a young lady bearing the engaging name of Miss Baby Thomas. The point of view from which this episode will be regarded is likely to vary with the age, the sex, and the experience of the reader. For a flirtation-manual nothing could be more clear, explicit, and graceful than the conversations set down between these two. The literary work of the book is an enjoyable contrast to that found in any other of the novels of the month. But the sadness, vacancy, and failure of the story are left wholly unredeemed. The idea of this "study with a moral," as it is called, no doubt is that Henry Vane had lived half submerged in the sombre gulfs of sadness, and that coming up to pluck at a gracious blossom of hope and love which grew on the verge, and failing, the nothingness of his future possibilities smote him and made him ready to slip
