feeling; what she loves in Russell is but incidentally himself and
actually his assured position and his assured prosperity. So considered,
her machinations to enchant and hold him have a comic aspect; one touch
more of exaggeration and she would pass over to join those sorry ladies
of the world of farce who take a larger visible hand in wooing than
human customs happen to approve. But Mr. Tarkington withholds that one
touch more of exaggeration. He understands that Alice's instinct to win
a husband is an instinct as powerful as any that she has and is all that
she has been taught by her society to have. In his handling she becomes
important; her struggle, without the aid of guardian dowager or
beguiling dot, becomes increasingly pathetic as the narrative advances;
and her eventual failure, though signalized merely by her resolution to
desert the inhospitable circles of privilege for the wider universe of
work, carries with it the sting of tragedy.

Mr. Tarkington might have gone further than he has behind the bourgeois
assumptions which his story takes for granted, but he has probably been
wiser not to. Sticking to familiar territory, he writes with the
confident touch of a man unconfused by speculation. His style is still
swift, still easy, still flexible, still accurate in its conformity to
the vernacular. He attempts no sentimental detours and permits himself
no popular superfluities. He has retained all his tried qualities of
observation and dexterity while admitting to his work the element of a
sterner conscience than it has heretofore betrayed. With the honesty of
his conclusion goes the mingling of mirth and sadness in _Alice Adams_
as another trait of its superiority. The manners of the young which
have always seemed so amusing to Mr. Tarkington and which he has kept on
watching and laughing at as his principal material, now practically for
the first time have evoked from him a considerate sense of the pathos of
youth. It strengthens the pathos of Alice's fate that the comedy holds