This story, of course, shocked the orthodox and respectable. It was a new kind of romanticism, familiar enough to Europe, but not to us. Could a woman’s soul remain pure while her body was sullied? The critics denied it; but, as it happens, several women of that sort have made their appearance since Phillips wrote--for example, the author of “Madeleine,” who had equally degrading experiences to tell, and yet kept her soul, and is working to help the downtrodden part of her sex. Nothing offends bourgeois respectables more than the statement that women are driven to prostitution by economic forces. They like to believe that the women of the poor are naturally depraved; also, they don’t want working girls made discontented with their lot, and they don’t want social reformers poking their noses into box factories and department-stores. So they call “Susan Lenox” an immoral book, and it is taboo in libraries and reviews. But as a matter of fact, David Graham Phillips shows himself in this book a thoroughly bourgeois person, safely and wholesomely “American” in his whole-hearted acceptance of the doctrine that a woman cannot and ought not try to live without comfort. Susan’s experience in the box factory is brief; she suffers, both in mind and body, but not so deeply that she cannot bear to leave the working class, and rise above it, and win fame and fortune by entertaining the master class, in that kind of prostitution known as the capitalist theatre. It does not occur to her to conceive a passionate ideal of sisterhood with all the oppressed factory workers; to hang on to her job with them, and teach and organize them, and lead them in a strike for better working conditions and higher wages. That, you see, is another method by which a heroine could develop a beautiful soul; another path by which she could break into the world of intellect and power--the way of class-consciousness and solidarity. But David Graham Phillips did not understand the revolutionary psychology, and could not have imparted it to his heroine; he was bound by the limitations of a small-town man from Indiana, a graduate of Princeton University, a city editor of capitalist newspapers. I read the scant records of his life, and find a leading critic praising him because he had “no panaceas”; meaning that the critic liked him because his thinking was as muddled as the critic’s.