Anthony Ball, of _The Lay Anthony_, strives toward the beauty of chastity—not morally concerned one way or the other, but resolute to preserve his physical purity for the sake of a girl whose body, he finds at last, has long ago been ravished by worms. Again there is in _Mountain Blood_ no hint of moral-mongering—for Mr. Hergesheimer is no more concerned with moral values than is the Decalogue—when Gordon Makimmon toils toward the beauty of atonement, to die in all a broken man, with his high goal yet gleaming on the horizon untouched. The three black Pennys flounder toward the beauty of a defiant carnal passion, which through the generations scorches and defiles, and burns out futilely by and by, leaving only slag where the aspiring lovely fire was. And through the formal garden ways of _Java Head_ pass feverishly at least five persons who struggle (and fretfully know their failure to be foredoomed) toward the capturing of one or another evincement of beauty, with the resultant bodily demolishment of three of them and the spiritual maiming of the others. That which one, for whatever reason, finds most beautiful must be sought; it is a goal which one seeks futilely, and with discomfort and peril, but which one seeks inevitably: such is the “plot” of these four novels. Such is also, as I need hardly say, the “plot” of the aforementioned fourteen years wherein not anything tangible was achieved except the consuming of youth and postage.... Nor does the dénouement differ, either, in any of these novels: the postman comes with the plethoric envelope which signals from afar that the result of much high-hearted striving is not quite suited to the present needs of this world’s editor; and sometimes the postman is Age, but more often he is Death. FIVE Now the fifth, and incomparably the finest and loveliest, of the Hergesheimer novels is _Linda Condon_, which renders self-confessedly a story of “the old service of beauty, of the old gesture toward the stars”—“here never to be won, never to be realized”—of the service which “only beauty knows and possesses”.... For _Linda Condon_ is to be valued less as the life-history of a woman than as the depiction—curt, incisive, and yet pitying—of a shrine that, however transiently, was hallowed. At the exacting workaday pursuit of being a human being this Linda fails, fails chilled and wistful. She has, like more of us than dare proclaim the defect, no talent whatever for heart-felt living, so that most persons seem but to pass grayly upon the horizon of her consciousness, like unintelligible wraiths gesticulating,—and always remaining somehow disjunct and not gravely important,—the while that all the needs and obligations of one’s corporal life must be discharged with an ever-present sense of their queer triviality. Toward nobody, neither toward Linda Condon’s mother nor lover, nor husband, nor children, may she, the real Linda, quite entertain any sense of actual attachment, far less of intimacy....