in Celibates and there is Lily Young, who left a convent for Mike Fletcher, and then we have Agnes Lahens, whose only happiness was in a claustral life. At one time I believe that this writer would have indorsed Nietzsche’s idea of a monastery for freethinkers. Didn’t H. G. Wells suggest a retreat for a Huysmans sect? Evelyn Innes, like John Norton, dilly-dallied with her innermost convictions. It was long before she realized that faith is a gift, is a special talent, which must be cultivated to a perfect flowering. And when she left her lovers, when she left the stage, after her father died in Rome,—here the long arm of coincidence is rather unpleasantly visible,—when she had professed, taken the veil, and became Sister Teresa, her former life fell away from her like water, and she was happy, a happy bride of Christ—until the honeymoon was over; for divine nuptials have their honeymoons, their chilly repulsions, their hours and days of indifference and despair. And this brings us to M. Huysmans. Mr. Peck, in his admirable estimate of George Moore,—in The Personal Equation,—writes that Moore is frankly a decadent, frankly a sensualist of the type of Huysmans, whom he intensely admires. “A page of Huysmans,” exclaims Moore, “is as a dose of opium, a glass of some exquisite and powerful liqueur.... Huysmans goes to my soul like a gold ornament of Byzantine workmanship. There is in his style the yearning charm of arches, a sense of ritual, the passion of the mural, of the window.” And Mr. Peck adds: “Mr. Moore’s affinity with Huysmans does not go further than a certain sensuous sympathy. He could never follow him....” But he has followed him, followed En Route; Huysmans has not only gone to his soul, but to his pen. He once wittily wrote: “Henry James went to France and read Turgénieff. W. D. Howells stayed at home and read Henry James.” This might be paraphrased thus: Joris Karel Huysmans, that unique disciple of Baudelaire, went to La Trappe and studied religion. George Moore, that most plastic-souled Irishman, stayed at home and studied Huysmans. This is the precise statement of a truth. Mr. Moore owes as much to Huysmans for his Sister Teresa. To no one does he owe Mildred Lawson. She is as much George Moore’s as L’Education Sentimentale is truly Flaubert’s. I do not know of her counterpart in fiction; like Frédéric Moreau, that unheroic hero, she is a heroine who failed from sheer lack of temperament. And her story is one of the best stories in the language.