So it was, no doubt, the impurest sort of envy and low-mindedness which caused me here to suspect alarming symptoms. I, in any event, put aside _The Happy End_ with profound discomfort; and turned to the reflection that Mr. Hergesheimer had since written _Linda Condon_, which discomforted me quite as poignantly by exposing to me my poverty in phrases sufficiently noble to apply to this wholly admirable book. § 67 Yet Mr. Hergesheimer, even in the least worthy of his magazine stories, writes really well. The phrase has an inadequate ring: but of how many novelists can this be pardonably said by anybody save their publishers? The majority of us, whatever and however weighty may be our other merits, can manage, in this matter of sheer writing, to select and arrange our adjectives and verbs and other literary ingredients acceptably enough, every now and then: and that is the utmost which honesty can assert. But Mr. Hergesheimer almost always writes really well, once you have licensed his idiosyncrasy of depending upon interjected proper names to explain to whom his, Hergesheimer's, pronouns refer; or of, as if with a feigned yawn, inserting the synonym, the qualification, which explains, suggests, that the word, the phrase, used, printed, isn't, after all, entirely, quite the affair he'd wanted.... Perhaps I here drift too remotely into technicalities, and tend to substitute for a consideration of architecture a treatise upon brick-making. In any event, I shall not here join in the chorus of the innumerable hundreds of critics who have pointed out how intensely Mr. Hergesheimer realizes the sensuous world of his characters and, in particular, the optic world. Yet I grant, he is the most insistently superficial of all writers known to me, in his emphasis upon shapes and textures and pigments. His people are rendered from complexion to coat-tail buttons, and the reader is given precisely the creasing of each forehead and the pleating of their under-linen. "The Works of Joseph Hergesheimer" contain whole warehousefuls of the most carefully finished furniture in print; and at bric-à-brac he has no English equal. It is all visioned, moreover, very minutely. Here is a guide who exhibits not merely the halls and presence-chambers of the building wherethrough he shepherds the public, but forces you to observe the chairs and panellings and wall-papers and window-curtains also, with an abnormal scrutiny. The scenery and the weather, to be sure, are "done" just as painstakingly; but these are indigenous impedimenta to most stories.