For, leaving on one side the delightful manner of the book, consider the material of which it is cleverly built. What and whom have we got here? The identical material of those interminable melodramas which the French (probably in an impotent attack on the tyrants of their national life) call ‘literature for concierges,’ and which in England was dear to the hearts of Ouida’s public. A glossy world of high society; some one (just as in _Under Two Flags_, and in how many other long-forgotten romances) assuming, for quite inadequate reasons, some one else’s sin and suffering bravely as an outcast until a third person blurts out the truth (the original touch being that in _The Green Hat_ the victim is the heroine instead of the hero, that she suffers from a husband’s syphilis instead of from a brother’s embezzlement, and that she dies at the end of the book); the cruel father separating youthful lovers who never, never forget one another (though, for the sake of modernity, during their separation the heroine, not the hero, leads a scandalous life--which, mind you, is never described, since its reality would have been squalid) and come together at last, when, in a final triumphant burst of renunciation, the heroine surrenders her lover to his wife and commits suicide. Sheer melodrama, as false, as quite properly false, as _Scènes de la Vie de Bohème_ or _Scaramouche_--precisely that sort of thing, in fact. And the characters: can you _see_ Hilary, or Guy, or Napier, or Venice? Have they three dimensions? Can you walk around them? Of course not. You’re not (I give Mr. Arlen credit for intending) supposed to be able to. And Iris, the radiant, the well-beloved, what is Iris? What but a very young man’s dream of a woman--experience plus innocence, a prostitute with the soul of a virgin? Go back a generation and you will find her in Mr. Le Gallienne’s _The Quest of the Golden Girl_. Well and good. I have no objection to any of this. I enjoyed the book immensely. But, please, let us not take it for something else than it is. I know almost nothing about Mr. Arlen, I have never even seen his photograph; yet I feel a pleasant personal liking for him. He provided me with an amusing book couched in a delightful style; and I do not for a moment believe that he himself takes it more earnestly than I do or considers it anything other than an agreeably up-to-date fairy-tale. If I have pointed out that the material of which it is constructed appears to me melodrama, not drama, sentimentality, not sentiment, artifice, not life, it is only because I wished to express my opinion that this is true of all the literature of sophistication, which--not here, but elsewhere--frequently presents itself as something more significant. A reading of _Some Do Not ..._ does not leave me with a similar affection for its author. I cannot escape the feeling that Mr. Ford takes that book hard! hard! and that in it he set out to write a masterpiece.