Page:The Genius of America (1923).pdf/145

 firm objectivity in a style terse, elliptical, mannish, like a travelled clubman back from the heart of Africa relating his adventures to other clubmen who have also been in Africa. Her book on Hawaii is written without this literary mask and contains, as I remember, a sigh or so in the character of Rosalind. Yet venturous curiosity is the dominant note; and one feels, when reading the account of the leper colony and the orgiastic native dances, that the author, like many highly refined ladies, might be prevailed upon, if properly chaperoned, to join a Senegalese headhunt, as a spectator, or to knit a scarf, like Dickens's French women, at the foot of a revolutionary place of justice.

Then the bold teller of tales disappears behind the screen to reappear in her recent volume of essays, Modes and Morals, as an excessively feminine "particular person" with a soul formed on old mahogany and blue china, with a rather vacuous, old-fashioned New Englandish cant about "high-thinking" and "intellectual values," with an obviously sincere attachment to parlormaids and "nice things," and with an overwhelming fear that in the widening social democracy of these times some bounder who says "don't" for "doesn't" may leap the barrier inclosing those who say "doesn't" and dine with