“_I’ll have you put out._” “You don’t dare, Becky--you don’t dare!”... Two pages more of this, and then Becky breaks out grandly: “What do you want, anyway? You have had everything I have to give: my hospitality, _my bread, my wine, my couch, my affection, gift-tokens of my love_--what do you want?” Kirby explains that he wants a wife and a soulmate--“a mind to be the companion of my mind.” But Becky refuses to marry him. Instead she goes to her bedroom and then returns with Kirby’s letters: “Here are your letters. You’ve stayed and had your say out. And now that you’ve said it, you can see for yourself that _you have no case against me_.... Here are your letters.” “I don’t want them.” “Very well, I’ll tear them up.” She proceeded to do so. “_Now all the evidence is destroyed_,” he said. I have thrown in a few italics to point the high spots of this singular colloquy. It goes on for page after page, and the whole book is filled with dialogues like it. What is one to make of such inconceivable banality? Is there worse in “An American Tragedy”? But Masters, you may say, is trying to depict eighth-rate people--frequenters of cabarets and hotel grill-rooms, male and female Elks, dubious hangers-on upon the edges of intelligence and decency--and that is how they actually talk. It may be so, but I note at once two objections to that defense. The first is that Masters does not appear to regard Kirby as eighth-rate; on the contrary, he takes the fellow’s moony drabbing quite seriously, and even tries to get a touch of the tragic into it. The second is that precisely the same hollow and meaningless fustian often appears when the author speaks in his own person. The way he tells his story is almost precisely the way it would be told by a somewhat intellectual shoe-drummer in a Pullman smoking-room. Its approach to the eternal sex question, its central theme, is exactly that of such a gentleman; its very phrases, in the main, are his phrases. He actually appears, in fact, as a sort of chorus to the drama, under the name of Bob Haydon. Bob, facing disillusion and death, favors Kirby with many cantos of philosophy. Their general burden is that the prudent man, having marked a sweet one to his taste, uses her person to his wicked ends, and then kicks her out. Kirby’s agonies do not move Bob, and neither do they bore him. “Bore me!” he exclaims. “This is better than a circus!”