hen in some
narrow bosom there must flash up the fires of youth and revolution. It
is so with Lulu Bett, dim drudge in the house of her silly sister and of
her sister's pompous husband: a breath of life catches at her and she
follows it on a pitiful adventure which is all she has enough vitality
to achieve but which is nevertheless real and vivid in a waste of
dulness.

Here was an occasion to arraign Warbleton as Mr. Lewis was then
arraigning Gopher Prairie; Miss Gale, instead of heaping up a multitude
of indictments, categorized and docketed, followed the path of
indirection which--by a paradoxical axiom of art--is a shorter cut than
the highway of exposition or anathema. Her story is as spare as the
virgin frame of Lulu Bett; her style is staccato in its lucid brevity,
like Lulu's infrequent speeches; her eloquence is not that of a torrent
of words and images but that of comic or ironic or tragic meaning packed
in a syllable, a gesture, a dumb silence. Miss Gale riddles the tedious
affectations of the Deacon household almost without a word of comment;
none the less she exhibits them under a withering light. The daughter,
she says, "was as primitive as pollen"--and biology rushes in to explain
Di's blind philanderings. "In the conversations of Dwight and Ina," it
is said of the husband and wife, "you saw the historical home forming in
clots in the fluid wash of the community"--and anthropology holds the
candle. Grandma Bett is, for the moment, the symbol of decrepit age, as
Lulu is the symbol of bullied spinsterhood. Yet in the midst of
applications so universal the American village is not forgotten, little
as it is alluded to. If the Friendships are sweet and dainty, so are
they--whether called Warbleton or something less satiric--dull and
petty, and they fashion their Deacons no less than their Pelleases and
Ettares. Thus hinting, Miss Gale, in her clear, flutelike way, joins the
chorus in which others play upon noisier instruments.

_Floyd Dell_

The year which saw the appearance of _Main Street_ and _Miss Lulu Bett_
saw also that of _The Age of Innocence_, Edith Wharton's acid
delineation of the village of Manhattan in the genteel seventies, given
over to the "innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the
heart against experience"; saw Mary Borden's _The Romantic Woman_, with
its cosmopolitan amusement at the village of Iroquois, otherwise
Chicago; and saw Floyd Dell's _Moon-Calf_, which, standing