she
tangles the web of life with the heedless hands of a child.

A less reflective novelist might be content with blaming or satirizing
her for her blind instinct to marry her richest suitor; for forcing him,
once married, to support her and her children at a pitch of luxury which
demands that he give up his personal aspirations in art or science or
altruism; for struggling so ruthlessly to plant her daughters in
prosperous soil which will nourish the "sacred seed" of the race
abundantly. Mr. Herrick, however, does not disapprove such instincts for
their own sake. He sees in them an element furnishing mankind with one
of its valuable sources of stability. What he assails is a national
conception which endows women with these instincts in mean, trivial,
unenlightened forms.

His criticism of the American Woman, indeed, is but an emphatic point in
his larger criticism of human life, and he has singled her out
essentially, it seems, because of the shallowness of her lovely
pretenses. It is the shallowness, not the sex, which arouses him. In
_The Common Lot_, in _The Memoirs of an American Citizen_, in _Clark's
Field_, and in certain of the strands of _Together_ it is the women who
demand that, no matter what happens, they shall be allowed to live their
lives upon the high plane of integrity from which the casual world is
always trying to pull men and women down. Integrity in love, integrity
in personal conduct, integrity in business and public affairs--this Mr.
Herrick holds to with a profound, at times a bleak, consistency which
has both worried and limited his readers. Integrity in love leads
Margaret Pole in _Together_, for instance, from her foolish husband to
her lover during one lyric episode and thereafter holds them apart in
the consciousness of a love completed and not to be touched with
perishable flesh. In novel after novel the characters come to grief from
the American habit of extravagance, which, as Mr. Herrick represents
it, seems a serious offense against integrity--springing from a failure
to control vagrant desires and tying the spirit to the need of
superfluous things until it ceases to be itself. And with never wearied
iteration he comes back to the problem of how the individual can
maintain his integrity in the face of the temptation to get easy wealth
and cut a false figure in the world.

Possibly it was a youth spent in New England that made Mr. Herrick as
sensitive as he has been to the atmospher