her fiction, imagination has the victory; in her essays, the timorous intelligence. To turn from the fiction to the essays affords a contrast as beguiling as to watch an agile performer on the stage who appears at one moment as a Long John Silver, walks behind a screen, and reappears a moment later as Lydia Languish.
As a writer of short stories Mrs. Gerould plays the part of a man in a world of men with fine bravado, only occasionally reminding one of Rosalind's remark, that doublet and hose must show itself courageous to petticoat. She owes something of her outfit to Mrs. Wharton, something to Henry James, and perhaps still more to Mr. Kipling of the Indian tales. A half-dozen of her best performances—for examples, "Vain Oblations," "The Miracle," "Wesendonck," and "The Weaker Vessel"—are as good as anybody's, originally conceived and brilliantly executed. They have taken shape in an emancipated and unabashed imagination, which constructs moral predicaments of high tension and probes with merciless artistic delight into possibilities that are sometimes to the last degree horrid and indeed almost insufferably revolting. Her studiously nonchalant manner enhances the effect of her matter. She presents the discoveries of her imagination with
