When he could bear this relationship no longer he fled to London, cast in his lot with Ann, a girl of the slums, and became a taxi driver. Here he was happy for a time because of his savage hunger for real things, no matter if they were degrading. The crude, harsh reality of this life fascinated him until he discovered that Ann’s love was no more the fulfillment of his dreams than his wife’s had been; only its honesty had made it endurable. When he discovers that Ann is to have a child—an unwanted, unexpected child that will be like a chain binding their two lives—he is driven to a second rebellion and the ultimate rediscovery of his first sweetheart. Ann shows her anger in the vulgar, uncontrolled outbursts natural to such a woman, and finally disappears to Canada, leaving René free to go to Cathleen. We are given to understand that at last René has attained to the happiness of his love dream, but nothing Mr. Cannan has told us warrants the belief that he might not suddenly discover that Cathleen too falls short of his vision of what real love should be and start out madly once more in pursuit of he knows not what. If he and Cathleen do finish their lives together it is safe to gamble that it will not be because René has learned to adjust himself to life but because he has met his Waterloo in Cathleen, a clever woman who wanted him and understood how to keep him. René was a rebel against the conventions which interfered with his happiness, a dreamer, and a seeker after the Holy Grail of love. His attempts to find happiness were utterly selfish, yet honest, so that our quarrel is not with his morals but with his egotism. He never awoke to the responsibilities of life, never felt remorse for the sufferings that he caused others, never grew up to the consciousness that life was intended for something higher than the fulfillment of his enthusiastic visions, but blundered into more or less freedom where another man, perhaps equally rebellious but more scrupulous, would quietly maintain his outward equanimity and let conventional spiders weave their webs all about him.