Aaron's whole life, or as much as the author gives us of it, is a dream, a dream unfulfilled in love or friendship or music. To what he wakes, if he wakes at all, the conclusion leaves us guessing. That will puzzle readers who demand that a story shall finish with a bang or come to a definite point of rest. But life does not conclude; it persists. When Aaron related his history and experiences to some friends, he "told all his tale as if it was a comedy. A comedy it seemed, too, at that hour. And a comedy no doubt it was. But mixed, like most things in this life. Mixed." Though Aaron is a strange man, an individual, yet the conflict that goes on in him, between his rebellion and his indecision, his desire and his impotence, is not freakish; it is so much like the struggle that every man knows, with special variations, that it is true to universal human nature. Behind the symbolism are the plain facts, solidly conceived. The other characters in the book are well drawn, notably Aaron's odd, philosophic friend, Lilly, whose ideas are at once clear and cryptic. There is a pitifully accurate portrait of a captain whose soul and nerves had not recovered from the war. In a single chapter through one man Mr. Lawrence suggests the disillusionment, the mental disaster, that followed the armistice. "None of the glamour of returned heroes, none of the romance of war ... the hot, seared burn of unbearable experience, which did not heal nor cool, and whose irritation was not to be relieved." In "The Lost Girl" and "Women in Love" the men are subordinate to the women. In "Aaron's Rod" the women are of secondary interest; Aaron's wife is rather indistinct and shadowy, and the Marchesa, the Cleopatra whom he tried to love and couldn't, never quite comes alive, either for Aaron or for the reader. Probably these women are just what Mr. Lawrence intended them to be, as seen through Aaron's temperament. But I do not feel that Mr. Lawrence has here made a very striking contribution to the history of the everlasting warfare between the sexes. Did Aaron miss because he happened not to meet the right woman? Or was he the sort of man whom no woman could capture and satisfy? Evidently Mr. Lawrence means to leave the eternal question unsettled even for the man whom he has created.