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 on the other side of controversy, lacks not only the disposition to sentimentalize the village but even the disposition to ridicule it.