lows disaster; we sup full of suffering. The Peacey child, after failing in everything, turns up as an incredibly nauseous Salvation Army Officer, and brings with him his fiancée, a lady who calls herself Miss Poppy Alicante, but is now more or less "converted." The house seethes with hatred, envy, and contempt.
Richard's filial love for Marion is so absorbing that he cannot give Ellen all the conjugal love she deserves and needs. Marion realizes this, and with a superb gesture, drowns herself, as if by accident, to get out of Ellen's way. But her subconscious self betrays her, and Richard learns the truth. He falls into the lethargy of desperate grief, and in an attempt to rouse him from it Ellen repeats to him the hysterical remarks of his Peacey half-brother, who says Marion was driven to suicide because Richard and Ellen had anticipated the marriage ceremony (this is untrue and an unconvincing reason anyhow, but like all Miss West's men, he has a nasty mind). Richard is roused only too successfully, for he puts a bread-knife in his brother's heart; and then goes off with Ellen to wait for the police on an island in the estuary. The book ends with Ellen wondering whether a son or a daughter is waiting for her there, and with us wondering what is going to happen to Richard after the sordid horrors of a sensational trial, and why poor Ellen should have to continue this fatal tradition of unmarried motherhood.
In synopsis the story may seem comic in the way that melodramas are. Actually it is almost unendurably painful. For Miss West writes quite extraordinarily well. There is here all the intensity of Mr D. H. Lawrence and all the remorselessness of Emily Brontë.
The book leaves us with a grudge against the author. We can bear the disasters that happen to Desdemona and Cordelia, because tragedy fits them. But it does not fit Ellen (it would not fit Rosalind) and it seems wanton to build up such an attractive character, only to throw her away into an infernal pit of family life, in which her wretched part could be played by an understudy. For in the latter part of the book she is the plaything of circumstance and wraith of her real self. We console ourselves with the belief that any one so humorous and capable as Ellen would have swept the poisonous accumulations of the past out of the house, the moment she entered it, and would never have allowed any further such disasters to occur there.
