point to insist that the method is as peculiarly adapted to one set of conditions as were dinosaurs or mastodons. Transferred, it is simply bones in a glass case.
Thus, the novel fluctuates between its strict localization and this lyrical drawing of the ever-widening circles. As a result the book has no consistent drive. Even the blurb is at a loss, for it heralds "A story of a group of people who are hindered by the relaxation of old standards of conduct and don't know what to do with their new freedom." There is, to be sure, one adolescent who enters and exits at intervals throughout the book, and who is undecided concerning his future. But even here the element of social transitions is only indirectly touched upon. (For which, by the way, let us be grateful.) I spoke of the opening triangle: Dudley, the artist; Julia, the wife; Lawrence, the husband. Actuated by a set of nuances which is not completely cogent—and the vagueness arises precisely because Mrs Scott always switches at such times from strict analysis of motives to Waldo Frank's type of lyrism—she tells Lawrence of their affair. He moves his bed into another room, and starts carrying his life from her bit by bit. She breaks off with Dudley—again by a set of elusive nuances—in the direction of a business man, and has an affair with him. After which she finally pierces Lawrence's steel on the last two pages, there is a reconciliation, and the book closes with:
"Unacknowledged, each kept for himself a pain which the other could not heal. Each pitied the other's illusion, and was steadied by it into gentleness."
Perhaps, in this fluctuation between the strict localizing of her characters and the drawing of lyrical circles, I have objected to the very thing which Mrs Scott was aiming for. But, if we are to have two poles of treatment, we must also have their polarity. It is not sufficient to juxtapose them without reconciliation. In the truest sense, significance is lost: the significance of some modus consistently and exclusively pursued.
