“The heroine of the story is a young woman artist who ... is believed by herself and her friends to be on the high road to ... success. At a country house, whither she had gone as a week-end guest, she finds that it is her host who has been buying all her paintings. Deeply wounded and humiliated by the discovery that her public is represented by only one man ... she rushes home and off to Europe without giving him a chance to make his explanations. She stays away for a year ... and wins some real fame in the shape of a salon medal, and while she is gone her admirer makes chivalric amends. And, of course, she comes back.”—N. Y. Times.
“Is not, by any means, equal to her short stories of slum children.”
| + | A. L. A. Bkl. 3: 135. My. ’07. |
“Her novel would appear to indicate that she lacks the novelist’s greater gift of imagination; the power of visualizing to herself the web of her invention.”
| + − | Ind. 62: 1268. My. 30, ’07. 160w. |
“While ‘Katherine Merrill’ and ‘Robert Ford’ are on the whole well-drawn characters, they are marred by that fatal gift of young novelists—smartness, which has a blasting effect upon style. Another fault which looms large in the book is affectation. In spite of these very palpable defects, however, the book has good points.”
| − + | Lit. D. 34: 724. My. 4, ’07. 170w. |
“Imagining a really strong, if painful situation, instead of bravely and patiently unravelling it, she positively submerges it in sugary optimism. It should, however, be confessed that her method will undoubtedly give perfect satisfaction to those readers who look upon a novel as a mental form of sweetened pepsin.”
| − | Nation. 84: 389. Ap. 25, ’07. 860w. |