There is in it, however, an undercurrent of deep human pathos and an admirable sense of human frailty. The author was clever enough to make Carrie’s seducer sympathetic. The book is well composed. The story is consistent throughout, and the plot dramatic from beginning to end, which is rarely the case with Dreiser. The dialogues are true to life and the environment very deftly suggested. Drouet, the “drummer” is a fascinating “booster,” a George Babbitt _avant la lettre_. Like most of Dreiser’s characters, he is a well balanced mixture of good and evil. (A true villain does not exist in Dreiser’s novels, because he does not probably exist in reality. His most monstrous characters show now and then some good inclination or other. This is true psychology.) A bluffer, an adventurer and a good fellow at heart, he is drawn from life. Carrie, the central character, is much less sympathetic. The heartless way in which she gives up the man who has sacrificed everything for her is not very chivalrous. Once more we see in her case Dreiser’s preference of the truly human to the imaginary and the romantic. The real pathos of the book rests upon Hurstwood, the “traveler at forty” led to his ruin by sex, as was Eugene Witla, the hero of “The Genius.” It is Hurstwood who fills the dramatic center of the book. He is the first specimen of moral disintegration presented by Theodore Dreiser. In this first novel of his the author had not yet given himself entirely up to strict objectivity and he was kind enough to draw for the reader the moral lesson implied in “Sister Carrie”: Oh, Carrie, Carrie! Oh, blind strivings of the human heart! Onward, onward, it saith, and where beauty leads, there it follows. Whether it be the tinkle of a lone sheep bell o’er some quiet landscape, or the glimmer of beauty in sylvan places, or the show of soul in some passing eye, the heart knows and makes answer, following. It is when the feet weary and hope seems vain that the heartaches and the longings arise. Know, then, that for you is neither surfeit nor content. In your rocking-chair, by your window dreaming, shall you long alone. In your rocking-chair, by your window, shall you dream such happiness as you may never fear. “Sister Carrie” is the tragedy of the thwarting of human aspirations. It presents Dreiser’s favorite philosophy concerning the conflict of society and the individual, the opposition of social and individual ethics. Our instincts are good of themselves but they may prove harmful to society.