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 atmosphere of affairs in Chicago, where fortunes have come in like a flood during his residence there, and where the popular imagination has been primarily enlisted in the game of seeing where the next wave will break and of catching its golden spoil. Mr. Herrick has not confined himself to Chicago for his scene; indeed, he is one of the least local of American novelists, ranging as he does, with all the appearances of ease, from New England to California, from farm to factory, from city to suburb, and along the routes of pleasure which Americans take in Europe. But Chicago is the true center of his universe, and he is the principal historian in fiction of that roaring village so rapidly turned town. He has not, however, been blown with the prevailing winds. The vision that has fired most of his fellow citizens has looked to him like a tantalizing but insubstantial mirage. Something in his disposition has kept him cool while others were being made drunk with opportunity.