“A civil wedding? Oh, well----” Ninian dismissed it. “But I,” said Dwight, “happen to be a magistrate.” They looked at one another foolishly. Dwight sprang up with the indeterminate idea of inquiring something of someone, circled about and returned. Ina had taken his chair and sat clasping Lulu’s hand. Ninian continued to laugh ... “I never saw one so offhand,” said Dwight. “But what you’ve said is all you have to say according to law. And there don’t have to be witnesses ... say!” he said, and sat again. And so it happens that Lulu Bett is married to Ninian--not for long for he deserts her right away and she comes back to her Cinderella’s duties in her sister’s home. Unfortunately for Lulu, Ninian was but an adventurer. How could she possibly miss reading it in that man’s eyes? Betrayed and abandoned, she came back home to resume her former drudgery. Zona Gale showed some pity for her at the end, a relative sort of pity, for she abandoned Lulu Bett to the circumambient banality. * * * * * I lack the space to go through the entire list of American novelists of to-day who have specialized, in their rôle of scrupulous realists, in the critique of Puritanism and of the repressions which follow upon it. Among them I should like to make a special place for Floyd Dell, one of the most original writers of to-day, author of “Moon Calf,” “The Briary Bush,” and more recently “The Runaway.” This last novel depicts a pathetic case of evasion. It tells the story of a man who goes as far away as China to forget his natal village and married life. He comes back after several years transformed and unrecognizable, to find himself a complete stranger, even to his own daughter. Unfortunately, the book ends like a popular “movie.” Examples of dual personalities are not rare in the work of modern American authors outside realism. I am thinking especially of the novels of Joseph Hergesheimer and Waldo Frank, two notable artists. Hergesheimer sticks to the purely romantic novel. He presented to us in exotic or historic surroundings seductive personalities, half real and half fantastic. The author of “Linda Condon,” of “Java Head,” is also that of “Cytherea.” This last novel is very Freudian. It depicts the explosion of a suppressed and tragic passion. The hero of “Cytherea,” an adept of the “secret life,” is bewitched by the magical spell of a fetish. He abandons his social rank, his wife, and his children, and goes to Cuba to seek romantic exaltation. The woman he loves is possessed like him of an irresistible desire. She is a magic doll, a reincarnation of the goddess of Cytherea. The couple end sadly in the tropics. She dies, and he finds himself alone in the world.