Just such postures and phantasms of adolescence lie behind all Mr. Tarkington's more serious plots--and not merely those earlier ones which he constructed a score of years ago when the mode in fiction was historical and rococo. Van Revel in _The Two Van Revels_, convinced and passionate abolitionist, nevertheless becomes as hungry as any fire-eater of them all the moment Polk moves for war on Mexico, though to Van Revel the war is an evil madness. In _The Conquest of Canaan_ Louden plays Prince Hal among the lowest his town affords, only to mount with a rush to the mayoralty when he is ready. _The Guest of Quesnay_ takes a hero who is soiled with every vileness, smashes his head in an automobile accident, and thus transforms him into that glorious kind of creature known as a "Greek god"--beautiful and innocent beyond belief or endurance. _The Turmoil_ is really not much more veracious, with its ugly duckling, Bibbs Sheridan, who has ideas, loves beauty, and writes verse, but who after years of futile dreaming becomes a master of capital almost overnight. Even _The Magnificent Ambersons_, with its wealth of admirable satire, does not satirize its own conclusion but rounds out its narrative with a hasty regeneration. And what can a critic say of such blatant nonsense as arises from the frenzy of propaganda in _Ramsey Milholland_? Perhaps it is truer to call Mr. Tarkington's plots sophomoric than to call them adolescent. Indeed, the mark of the undergraduate almost covers them, especially of the undergraduate as he fondly imagines himself in his callow days and as he is foolishly instructed to regard himself by the more vinous and more hilarious of the old graduates who annually come back to a college to offer themselves--though this is not their conscious purpose--as an object lesson in the loud triviality peculiar and traditional to such hours of reunion. Adolescence, however, when left to itself, has other and very different hours which Mr. Tarkington shows almost no signs of comprehending.