Meanwhile she has her loveliness, not of character or mind, but a loan of surpassing physical beauty. And to Linda Condon her own bright moving carcass becomes a thing to be tended and preserved religiously, because beauty is divine, and she herself is estimable, if at all, as the fane which beauty briefly inhabits.... And by and by, under time's handling, her comeliness is shriveled, and her lovers are turned to valueless dust: but first, has Linda's lost young beauty been the buried sculptor's inspiration, and this has been perpetuated, in everlasting bronze. The perfection of Linda Condon's youth is never to perish, and is not ever to be dulled by old age or corrupted in death. She comprehends this as she passes out of the story, a faded, desolate and insignificant bit of rubbish, contented to know that the one thing which really meant much to her is, as if by a miracle, preserved inviolate. The statue remains, the immutable child of Linda's comeliness and Pleydon's genius, the deathless offspring of transitory things. Beauty is divine; a power superior and somewhat elfinly inimical to all human moralities and rules of thumb, and a divinity which must unflinchingly be served: that, in this book is Mr. Hergesheimer's text. For this is the divinity which he, too, has served, time and again, with strangely patterned evocations, in striving to write perfectly of beautiful happenings. It is an ideal here approached more nearly and more nobly than in the preceding Hergesheimer books. Nowhere, indeed, to my thinking, has Joseph Hergesheimer found an arena nicelier suited to the exercise of his most exquisite powers than in this modern tale of domnei,--of the worship of woman's beauty as, upon the whole, Heaven's finest sample of artistic self-expression, and as, in consequence, the most adequate revelation of God; and, as such a symbol, therefore, the one thing to be revered above all else that visibly exists, even by its temporary possessor. That last is Mr. Hergesheimer's especial refinement upon a tenet sufficiently venerable to have been nodded over by Troy's gray-bearded councillors when that phantom woman whom they believed to be Queen Helen passed,--and a refinement, too, which would have been repudiated by Helen herself, who, if one may trust to Euripides' report of her sentiments, was inclined to regard more prosaically her own personal appearance, as a disaster-provoking nuisance.