Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/41

 part of well-bred young people, occasioned in part by the stresses of the war. Mr. Galsworthy, like Mr. Wells, inclines to make ecstasy rather than legality the test of right relations between men and women, though I think most of his heroes and heroines are somewhat less incorrigibly expectant than those of Mr. Wells. In The Forsyte Saga, his prime achievement and a rich and various and notable work, he makes his most significant study of that Victorian dilemma upon which Jane Eyre was so nearly impaled. In the case of Soames Forsyte and Irene and Jolyon, he brings, with great circumstantiality and seriousness, a fine woman face to face with the choice of illegal status or the substantial frustration of life; and Irene unequivocally accepts the illegal status. The entire treatment of the theme indicates, I think, Mr. Galsworthy's belief that she was ethically justified, as she was also justified by the general consequences, in her union with Jolyon. The one high crime in the book, as Mr. Galsworthy conceives it, is Soames Forsyte's exaction of marital rights from a wife who is in love with another man.

I wonder whether Cornelia has read The Forsyte Saga. I wonder whether, if she should enter