when the man who has divorced her looms up in her horizon with
doom in his presence, she goes and makes love to him. She is not
the less successful because she disgusts him; he agrees to let
her alone so long as she does no mischief; she has, at least,
made him unwilling to feel himself her persecutor, and that is
enough for her.

Mrs. Hunter is a study of extreme interest in degeneracy, but I
am not sure that Kitty Morrow is not a rarer contribution to
knowledge. Of course, that sort of selfish girl has always been
known, but she has not met the open recognition which constitutes
knowledge, and so she has the preciousness of a find. She is at
once tiresome and vivacious; she is cold-hearted but not
cold-blooded, and when she lets herself go in an outburst of
passion for the celibate young ritualist, Knellwood, she becomes
fascinating. She does not let herself go without having assured
herself that he loves her, and somehow one is not shocked at her
making love to him; one even wishes that she had won him. I am
not sure but the case would have been a little truer if she had
won him, but as it is I am richly content with it. Perhaps I am
the more content because in the case of Kitty Morrow I find a
concession to reality more entire than the case of Mrs. Hunter.
She is of the heredity from which you would expect her depravity;
but Kitty Morrow, who lets herself go so recklessly, is, for all
one knows, as well born and as well bred as those other
Philadelphians. In my admiration of her, as a work of art,
however, I must not fail of justice to the higher beauty of Mary
Fairthorne's character. She is really a good girl, and saved
from the unreality which always threatens goodness in fiction by
those limitations of temper which I have already hinted.