But such a father, such a daughter! If you were to ask me frankly if a girl could sacrifice everything for art I would as frankly reply, Yes; lots of them have. I have met a dozen myself. Moore does not believe that the moral sense can flourish in an artistic atmosphere. Perhaps he is right. Evelyn is dissatisfied with success. Her nature is too complex to find gratification in the society of Sir Owen Asher. A new man looms up. He is dark, has teeth, is a mystic, a Roscicrucian, perhaps a diabolist. He is a Celt and is composing to a Celtic legend a great music-drama; his musical forms are antique, and he wins Evelyn, after the first performance of Isolde. This scene caused all the bellboys of literature to cry “horrors!” I confess, however, that the second love is incomprehensible. It is entered into in too cold-blooded a manner. She becomes still more dissatisfied, and after a week of insomnia her early religious beliefs get the uppermost, and she goes to confession. But you feel that she has only met a third will stronger than her own. A Monsignor Mostyn, the best male portrait of the book, forces her to bend her knee to God, and she goes into conventual retreat. We get a few closing chapters—dreary ones—devoted to convent life, and then Evelyn goes forth once more into the world. Her character is exceedingly well drawn, although I must protest against the overloading of page after page with elaborate psychologizing. Moore has deserted the brutal simplicities of his earlier manner for a Bourget-like shovelling of arid psychical details upon your wearied brain. The story becomes hazy, the main figure nebulous. At every step in the latter half of the book I detect Joris Karel Huysmans and his En Route. Evelyn Innes becomes a feminine Durtal, sick of life, afraid of God. There is too much padding in the shape of discussions about early church music—more Huysmans! Huysmans’s practice of cataloguing is very monotonous. Yet it is the best thing in the way of a literary performance that George Moore has accomplished. The style is decomposed, but it is melodious, flexible, smooth, and felicitous. One can see that he knows his Pater. Mr. Moore had used to advantage his knowledge of the London musical set. Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch may have sat for a portrait of Evelyn’s father. Mr. Dolmetsch is a player on the harpsichord and spinet. But who is Evelyn Innes? That is a dangerous question. Possibly she is a composite of Melba, Calvé, Eames, and Nordica. Oddly enough, she gets a tiara, presented to her by the subscribers of the opera at New York! Of course this points to Nordica, but Nordica could never read music at sight,—you remember the one thousand piano rehearsals for Tristan,—and so that clew is misleading. Perhaps the author may enlighten the musical world some day. Lady Grimalkin is certainly intended for Lady de Grey.