The book is a fictitious biography of a _femme galante_. It is not the sort of book that is given as a prize in a girl's school, though I am by no means sure that it would not be more useful than many of the books that are put to that use. It says what ought to be said about its heroine without any of the sentimental lasciviousness and avoidance of the unpleasant side of clandestine gallantry which makes most of our novels so dangerous to young people. Sudermann is blunt, frank, and contemptuous, where the English hack-writer would be furtive, inferential, discreet, and superficially decent. He strips the romance off Bohemianism ruthlessly, and takes care that if you are curious about the sort of life that is open to a woman who has lost her position in respectable society in Berlin, you shall know the truth about it. Not that he attaches any false consequences to it for the sake of an edifying moral. His heroine does not starve, does not jump over the bridge, and fares better than most ugly, honest, and hard-working women as far as her circumstances are concerned. She is left at the end of the book in a position which many respectable English families would be very glad to see their daughters in. The author makes no attempt to flatter society by denying or hiding the fact that immorality pays a penniless girl who is pretty and amiable better than morality, and that it even leaves her a better chance of being married than the drudgeries and disfigurements of singing The Song of the Shirt. But that it damages her soul cruelly and incurably he brings out mercilessly. He deliberately leads you into all sorts of foolish sentimental sympathies with her, only in the end to bring you the harder up against Dr. Johnson's opinion of her. She is left, as such women often are left, with an adoring husband, a luxurious income, and everything the most virtuous heroine could ask from British fiction, but hopelessly damned all the same. You need not fear that anyone who reads the book will envy her or be tempted to go and do likewise. It is worth adding that what began the mischief with her was having nothing readable within her reach except popular novels which made everything that tempted her seem poetic and delightful and honorable, and were therefore not suppressed by the censorship.