What is more, he will make all necessary confessions. He has not, perhaps, kept to the letter of fidelity. There was a waitress in Berlin; there was a nurse at the surgical clinic; there is even now a Lithuanian servant girl at his bachelor quarters. The last named, of course, will be sent away forthwith. Robert is a man of honor, a man sensitive to every requirement of the punctilio, a gentleman. He will order the announcement cards, consult a clergyman—and not forget to get rid of the Lithuanian and air the house.... Poor Toni stares at him as he departs. “Will he come back soon?” asks the child. “I scarcely think so,” she answers.... “That night she broke the purpose of her life, the purpose that had become interwoven with a thousand others, and when the morning came she wrote a letter of farewell to the beloved of her youth.” A short story of rare and excellent quality. A short story—oh, miracle!—worth reading twice. It is not so much that its motive is new—that motive, indeed, has appeared in fiction many times, though usually with the man as the protagonist—as that its workmanship is superb. Sudermann here shows that, for all his failings elsewhere, he knows superlatively how to write. His act divisions are exactly right; his _scènes à faire_ are magnificently managed; he has got into the thing that rhythmic ebb and flow of emotion which makes for great drama. And in most of the other stories in this book you will find much the same skill. No other, perhaps, is quite so good as “The Purpose,” but at least one of them, “The Song of Death,” is not far behind. Here we have the tragedy of a woman brought up rigorously, puritanically, stupidly, who discovers, just as it is too late, that love may be a wild dance, an ecstasy, an orgy. I can imagine no more grotesquely pathetic scene than that which shows this drab preacher’s wife watching by her husband’s deathbed—while through the door comes the sound of amorous delirium from the next room. And then there is a strangely moving Christmas story, “Merry Folk”—pathos with the hard iron in it. And there are “Autumn” and “The Indian Lily,” elegies to lost youth—the first of them almost a fit complement to Joseph Conrad’s great paean to youth triumphant. Altogether, a collection of short stories of the very first rank. Write off “Das hohe Lied,” “Frau Sorge” and all the plays: a Sudermann remains who must be put in a high and honorable place, and will be remembered. IX. GEORGE ADE