and had revolted!

"But I don't get anywhere," she said wearily. "At times I feel this
ferment, this anger that things are as they are, only to realize what
helpless anger it is. Why not take the world as it appears and live and
feel, instead of beating against the currents?"

"But isn't that inconsistent with what you said awhile ago as to a new
civilization?" Hodder asked.

"Oh, that Utopia has no reality for me. I think it has, at moments, but
it fades. And I don't pretend to be consistent. Mr. Bentley lives in a
world of his own; I envy him with all my heart, I love and admire him,
he cheers and soothes me when I am with him. But I can't see--whatever
he sees. I am only aware of a remorseless universe grinding out its
destinies. We Anglo-Saxons are fond of deceiving ourselves about life,
of dressing it up in beautiful colours, of making believe that it
actually contains happiness. All our fiction reflects this--that is
why I never cared to read English or American novels. The Continental
school, the Russians, the Frenchmen, refuse to be deluded. They are
honest."

"Realism, naturalism," he mused, recalling a course in philosophy, "one
would expect the Russian, in the conditions under which he lives,
possessing an artistic temperament combined with a paralysis of the
initiative and a sense of fate, to write in that way. And the Frenchmen,
Renan, Zola, and the others who have followed, are equally deterministic,
but viewing the human body as a highly organized machine with which we
may amuse ourselves by registering its sensations. These literatures are
true in so far as they reflect the characteristics of the nations from