considered. She has been sympathetically and intelligently studied. She has been understood in her pathetic relations to her mother; in her variously irritating relations to a series of employers; in relation to the humdrum suitor that she leaves in Panama, the brilliant young cub who leaves her, the fat-necked voluble commercial traveller whom she marries; in relation, finally, to the intimate inner conflict between her sexual and emotional instincts and her desire to respect herself and to "amount to something." The thing is, as Henry James used to say, "done," and with great precision of stroke. Una Golden lives, and her futile mother. The erratic and "dynamic" young cub, Walter Babson, lives. Eddie Schwirtz, the commercial traveller, a gorgeous beast, lives. And they and dozens of subordinate characters move without confusion through dozens of offices, apartments, boarding-houses and streets, each eruditely saturated with the appropriate elements of its own atmosphere.
Not an interesting group, till Mr. Lewis became vividly interested in it. What value does he see in Una Golden? What beauty? Well, he sees her as an intelligent and purposeful feminine will, emerging from the respectable helplessness and hopelessness of girls who married their first choice and "settled down" in Panama, Pennsylvania,—emerging into the beauty of a self-directed life. He sees her as a girl with youth's hunger for enchantment, with arms outstretched for it, missing it, but closing resolutely upon what the wisest among the
