Now Mr. Moore is an outspoken defender of the few crumbling privileges
of man at a time when the "ladies" are claiming the earth and adjacent
planets. Yet I don't believe he wrote Mildred Lawson (in the volume
entitled Celibates) with malice prepense. Too great an artist to use
as a dialectic battering-ram one of his characters, for all that he
makes Mildred very "modern." She doesn't despise men, nor does she
care much for the ideas of her dowdy friend the "advanced" Mrs.
Fargus; on the contrary, she makes fun of her clothes and ideas,
though secretly regretting that she hadn't been sent by her parents to
Girton College. Like Hedda she is ambitious to outshine any circle in
which she finds herself. Modern she is, not because of her petty
traits, but simply because Mr. Moore has painted a young woman of the
day, rich, and so selfish that at the end her selfishness strangles
the little soul she possesses. Her brother Harold, a sedate business
man, is also a celibate whose ambition in life seems to be the
catching of the 9:10 A.M. train to Victoria Station and the return to
his suburban home on the 6 P.M. (He is not unlike a fussy little man,
Willy Brooks, in the same Irish writer's early novel, Spring Days.) A
rejected but ever hopeful suitor of Mildred's about comprises her
domestic entourage.

She is ambitious. She hates the "stuffy" life of a hausfrau, but
marriage makes no appeal, since the breaking of her engagement with
Alfred--who is also a man with punctual business habits. She despises
conventional men, and is herself compact of conventionality. In her
most rebellious moods the leaven of Philistia (or the British
equivalent, Suburbia) comes to the surface. She dares, but doesn't
dare enough. "It needs both force and earnestness to sin." As in the
case of Hedda Gabler, it is her social conscience that keeps her from
throwing her bonnet over the moon, not her sense of moral values; in a
word, virtue by snobbish compulsion. One thinks of Dante Gabriel
Rossetti and the searing irony of his sonnet, Vain Virtues. The virtue
of Mildred Lawson is vanity of vanities and the abomination of
desolation.

She often argued that "it was not for selfish motives that she desired
freedom." Her capacity for self-illuding is enormous. She didn't love
her drawing-master, the unfortunate Mr. Hoskin, who had a talent for
landscape, but no money, yet she allowed the man to think she did care
a little and it sent him into bad health