She is ambitious. She hates the "stuffy" life of a hausfrau, but marriage makes no appeal, since the breaking of her engagement with Alfred--who is also a man with punctual business habits. She despises conventional men, and is herself compact of conventionality. In her most rebellious moods the leaven of Philistia (or the British equivalent, Suburbia) comes to the surface. She dares, but doesn't dare enough. "It needs both force and earnestness to sin." As in the case of Hedda Gabler, it is her social conscience that keeps her from throwing her bonnet over the moon, not her sense of moral values; in a word, virtue by snobbish compulsion. One thinks of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the searing irony of his sonnet, Vain Virtues. The virtue of Mildred Lawson is vanity of vanities and the abomination of desolation. She often argued that "it was not for selfish motives that she desired freedom." Her capacity for self-illuding is enormous. She didn't love her drawing-master, the unfortunate Mr. Hoskin, who had a talent for landscape, but no money, yet she allowed the man to think she did care a little and it sent him into bad health when he found she had fooled him. The scene in the studio, where the dead painter lies in his coffin, between Mildred and his mistress--a model from the "lower" ranks of life--is one of the most stirring in modern fiction. The "lady" comes off second-best; when she begins to stammer that she hoped the dead man hadn't suggested improper relations, the unhappy girl turns on her: "I dare say you were virtuous more or less, as far as your own body is concerned. Faugh! women like you make virtue seem odious." Mildred, indignant at such "low conversation," makes her escape, slightly elated at the romantic crisis. A real man has died for her sake. After all, life is not so barren of interest. She goes to Paris. Studies art. Returns to London. Again to Paris and the forest of Fontainebleau, where she joins a student colony and flirts with a young painter; but it all comes to nothing, just as her work in the Julian Studio has no artistic result. Mr. Moore, who is a landscape-painter, has drawn a capital picture of the forest, though not with the fulness of charm to be found in Flaubert's treatment of the same theme in Sentimental Education. The little tale is a genuine contribution to fiction in which art is adequately dealt with. When Celibates appeared, Henry Harland said that Mildred Lawson was worthy of Flaubert if it had been written in good English, which is a manifest epigram. The volume is a perfect breviary of selfishness.