leaving the flesh and blood out of his women. He leaves out, at least,
with no fluttering compunctions, any special concern for the simpler
biological aspects of the sex: "It was not what the woman had in common
with a rabbit that was important, but her difference. On one hand that
difference was moral, but on the other aesthetic; and I had been
absorbed by the latter." "I couldn't get it into my head that
loveliness, which had a trick of staying in the mind at points of death
when all service was forgotten, was rightly considered to be of less
importance than the sweat of some kitchen drudge."

Such robust doctrine is a long way from the customary sentimentalism of
novelists about maids, wives, mothers, and widows. Indeed, Mr.
Hergesheimer, like Poe before him, inclines very definitely toward
beauty rather than toward humanity, where distinctions may be drawn
between them. In Linda Condon, however, his most remarkable creation, he
has brought humanity and beauty together in an intimate fusion. Less
exotic than Taou Yuen, Linda, with her straight black bang and her
extravagant simplicity of taste, is no less exquisite. And like Taou
Yuen she affords Mr. Hergesheimer the opportunity he most desires--"to
realize that sharp sense of beauty which came from a firm, delicate
consciousness of certain high pretensions, valors, maintained in the
face of imminent destruction.... In that category none was sharper than
the charm of a woman, soon to perish, in a vanity of array as momentary
and iridescent as a May-fly." It is as the poet musing upon the fleet
passage of beauty rather than as the satirist mocking at the vanity of
human wishes that Mr. Hergesheimer traces the career of Linda Condon;
but both poet and satirist meet in his masterpiece.

A woman as lovely as a lyric, she is almost as insensible as a steel
blade or a bright star. The true marvel is that beauty so cold can