It is impossible to make a character study convincing without taking heredity into account, and this irrespective of whether heredity or environment plays the greater rôle in a mortal’s life. The eternal controversy as to which of these two influences is preponderant is largely futile because the preponderance differs with various persons, differs with the traits inherited, differs with a thousand differing pressures of circumstance. One thing is certain: whether anything is known about an individual’s inherited endowment or not we always and inescapably assume that he has one. The best handy illustration of this is Jennie Cushing in Mary S. Watts’s book, _The Rise of Jennie Cushing_. Nothing whatever is known by us regarding Jennie Cushing’s inheritance; we don’t know her parentage any more than she does. Her environment we know with awful exactitude and we are perfectly conscious that it fails utterly to explain her except, of course, her marvelous and painfully acquired gift of reticence. We are forced, therefore, to presuppose in her case an inheritance of extraordinary will-power and extraordinary sensitiveness to beauty in any of its forms. And we do presuppose it! It makes her wholly credible; more credible, probably, than any careful account of her forebears could have made her. Now in _The Iron Woman_, indisputably Mrs. Deland’s finest story, we get both heredity and environment exactly known and precisely compounded. Indeed, if Mrs. Deland’s great novel has a fault it is the fault of giving us more knowledge than should be ours. Her people are so complete that there is no unknown quantity in the equation they make. It is just a trifle too good to be true, too life-like to be convincing. Knowing to the last inch what they are (as we know our neighbors of long standing) we know to the last degree what they will do, under what circumstances they will do it, how they will do it and what the result upon them and upon others, just as minutely known, will be. To see Sarah Maitland and the boy Blair is like watching a terrible and inevitable and perfectly anticipated tragedy approaching in the house next door. Listen: