On the other hand, Miss E. M. Delafield's _Humbug_ reveals with startling clearness the falseness of self-seeking in passion. Her argument is the more convincing because her heroine, Lily Stellenthorpe, has the best of reasons for adopting the new ideal, the strongest possible temptation to follow a false light. Her sensitive and vital nature had been cramped from birth by "a good woman's capacity for the falsification of moral values." Her father literally drove her along the same demoralizing groove. Love and respect for their honest, but kind, goodness almost compel insincerity and the complete self-annihilation. Under such influences, she acquires a _good_ husband. He, alas, dictates her conscience, assumes that so sweet a woman will conform to type. It seems almost a brutal sin for her to act, think, or even feel, for herself. Steadily she grows more hidden, secret, and hypocritical. This careful preparation for modern self-passion is admirably drawn. We can scarcely deny that any sudden outburst of even cruel selfishness or revolt might be excused, if not absolutely justified, for _her_. Inevitably the occasion comes. The expected lover appears, young, ardent, understanding; all, it seems to her revived free impulse, that she had been seeking for many years. Lily, however, does not snatch at happiness, flare out herself. She looks into herself, getting herself—as it were—in order, before so fateful a choice. She thought first, _as she had been told by a sympathetic schoolmistress_, "What I need, what I must have, if I am ever to fulfil myself—is romance. I must learn not to be afraid of life. Some day, I shall love. Am I to pretend to myself that such a thing is out of the question because I am married?" Why not strike for freedom, and begin life again? She "thought that the conflict lay, as so often, between sincerity and sentiment." Only sentiment made it "impossible for her to be ruthless" to her husband. "_Then illumination came to her, searing and vivid._" The lover was, after all, a mere "pretext," an opportunity for one more experiment with life, one more feverish attempt to find some false image of herself. "Was the freedom for which she looked to be based upon yet another artificial value? After all, why should she arrogate to herself the right of deciding what her greatest happiness was to be? . . . The long, long way round that it had been, to arrive at last at her own convictions, and cease to try and wrench them into line with those of other people!" "The gift" of herself "had been made" to her husband. Her real self lay with him and with their coming child. So she conquered the final test, escaped "applying a general law to a particular case—taking one's values ready-made—the old, old humbug." As "the last comforting falsity fell from her she saw . . . the truth."