the complex arts of the parasite.

Ascribe it to the vanity of men who choose to regard women as luxurious
chattels and the visible symptoms of success; ascribe it to a wasteful
habit practised by a nation never compelled to make the best use of its
resources; ascribe it to the craft of a sex quick to seize its advantage
after centuries of disadvantage--ascribe it to whatever one will, the
fact remains that the United States has evolved a widely admired type of
woman who lacks the glad animal spontaneity of the little girl, the
ardent abandon of the mistress, the strong loyalty of the wife, the
deep, calm, fierce instincts of the mother; and who even lacks--although
here a change has taken place since Mr. Herrick began to chronicle
her--the confident impulse to follow her own path as an individual,
irrespective of her peculiar functions. It must be remembered, of
course, that Mr. Herrick has had in mind not the vast majority of women,
who in the United States as everywhere else on earth still fully
participate in life, but the American Woman, that traditional figure
compounded of timid ice and dainty insolence and habitually tricked out
with a wealth which holds the world so far away that it cannot see how
empty she really is. He has sought in his novels, by dissecting the
pretty simulacrum, to show that it has little blood and less soul.

At times he writes with a biting animus. In _One Woman's Life_ Milly
schemes herself out of the plain surroundings into which she was born,
lapses from her designs enough to marry a poor man for love but
subsequently wrecks his career and wears him out by her ambitious
ignorance, and before she ends the story in the arms of another husband
has contrived to waste the savings of a friend of her own sex who tries
to help her. In _The Healer_ the doctor's wife continually drags him
back from the passionate exercise of his true gift, luring him with her
beauty to live in the world which nearly destroys him, though he finally
comprehends the danger and escapes her. And in _Together_, its epic
canvas crowded with all kinds and conditions of lovers and married
couples, Mr. Herrick never spares the type. Other novelists may be
content to show her glittering in her maiden plumage; he advances to the
point where it becomes clear that the qualities ordinarily exalted in
her are nothing but signs of an arrested spiritual and moral
development. Hard and wilful enough, she never becomes mature, and