their worst tempers. They are so exclusively well born and well
bred that the fitness of the medical student, Blount, for their
society can be ascertained only by his reference to a New England
ancestry of the high antiquity that can excuse even dubious cuffs
and finger-nails in a descendant of good principles and generous
instincts.

The psychological problem studied in the book with such artistic
fineness and scientific thoroughness is personally a certain Mrs.
Hunter, who manages through the weak-minded and selfish Kitty
Morrow to work her way to authority in the household of Kitty's
uncle, where she displaces Mary Fairthorne, and makes the place
odious to all the kith and kin of Kitty. Intellectually, she is
a clever woman, or rather, she is a woman of great cunning that
rises at times to sagacity; but she is limited by a bad heart and
an absence of conscience. She is bold up to a point, and then
she is timid; she will go to lengths, but not to all lengths; and
when it comes to poisoning Fairthorne to keep him from changing
his mind about the bequest he has made her, she has not quite the
courage of her convictions. She hesitates and does not do it,
and it is in this point she becomes so aesthetically successful.
The guilt of the uncommitted crimes is more important than the
guilt of those which have been committed; and the author does a
good thing morally as well as artistically in leaving Mrs. Hunter
still something of a problem to his reader. In most things she
is almost too plain a case; she is sly, and vulgar, and depraved
and cruel; she is all that a murderess should be; but, in
hesitating at murder, she becomes and remains a mystery, and the
reader does not get rid of her as he would if she had really done
the deed. In the inferior exigencies she strikes fearlessly; and