Page:The Genius of America (1923).pdf/146

 a friend or relative in the superior class—with possible matrimonial consequences quite too dreadful to contemplate. I have only begun in this long sentence to enumerate Mrs. Gerould's trepidations. She fears the world she lives in and pretty much all its works and ways. Her fundamental and controlling fear is due to "the increased hold of the democratic fallacy on the public mind." She fears materialism. She has also a great horror of science. She is afraid of new races and the influx of an inferior population which will basely compromise with mission furniture and domestic rugs. She apprehends that these forces will extirpate something precious which she calls "culture."

I relish, as I have intimated, the style and the æsthetically applied splashes of barbaric color in her stories. No one paints better than she the beautiful wife in one of our best families, pacing restlessly across a Chinese rug under tall windows through floods of glowing sunlight, meditating an elopement, but restrained by those delicacies of feeling which, as every one knows, are developed by living amid priceless old Chippendale. I enjoy so much the bravado of her stories that I hesitate to say how deeply I have been shocked by the pusillanimity of her