The author's further treatment of the problems connected with marriage is seen in two other noteworthy Atlantic stories—The Kinzer Portraits and The Long Inheritance.
BUTTERCUP-NIGHT
John Galsworthy, an English 'novelist of much distinction, and a playwright who has proved that the possession of ideas is not incompatible with popular success. Endowed with an exquisite sense of pity, he has put that sentiment to many chivalrous uses, and since the war he has written in the public service on behalf of various patriotic and humanitarian objects.' Thus Mr. Galsworthy was described in the London Gazette as a recipient of the honor of knighthood in the list of New Year (1918) Honors, his declination not having been received in time to forestall the publication.
Buttercup-Night is hardly a story at all. In company with Mr. Galsworthy we live out the quiet but impressive experience of a single evening, night, and morning, all the while breathing the atmosphere of a rare June beauty that completely wins us to its æsthetic favor and repose. The incident of the sick horse, so gently cared for by the faithful keeper, secures our sympathy but does not draw us away from the more insistent wooing of the charms of the buttercup-night and the morning radiance of a suddenly awakened glow of blooming yellow. The commonplace writer would use the scene for romantic effect; Galsworthy enhances the beauty of the setting by a homely but sincere realism. The significant merits of the style are its purity, its restraint, and its complete adaptability to the hoveringly quiescent mood.
HEPATICAS
Anne Douglas Sedgwick (Madame Basil de Sélincourt) is of American birth, but has lived in England since her childhood. For many years she has found an admiring audience as a writer of novels and short stories. In 1908 she was married to M. de Sélincourt.
The title of the story hints at a reliance upon mere setting. And the hepatica bed, with all that its associations signify, certainly makes its generous atmospheric contribution to the charm of the narrative. But as domestic entanglements begin to ensue, our interest in the flowers is soon shifted to plot and theme. Our sustained sympathy rests with the mother—the mother who has created in her home an atmosphere of the truest and most sensibly refined culture. The promising son, sharing this atmosphere and even enriching it, yields while at Aldershot before the war to the superficial charm of a chorus girl, and marries her. Her loud and garish presence in the home of quiet beauty and repose provides an interesting but tragic study in contrast, and makes us continually more anxious as we watch its influence upon the mother, yearning pityingly for her absent son, yet plaintively relieved when news comes that he has been killed in the war. Death has released him from the grim necessity of living his mismated life and caring for the child born of parents of such divergent types. The supreme merit of the mother's character lies in her willing acceptance of the burdening problem. The strength of the story, as we view it in its entirety, rests in a skillful merging of effects which allows final emphasis upon character portrayal and thematic situation.