A quietly perceptive friend once told me of his conviction that people who "mean well" are the most dangerous of human beings, but I never fully realized the awful implications of this twisted truism until I witnessed Mrs. Taylor's genteel flaying of Flora Quartermaine [the subject of The Soul of Kindness] model wife, daughter, and friend, as ingenuously destructive as a rabid lamb, Flora's worries were always other people's worries; her pink, smiling face creased unbelievingly at intimations that people could possibly resent her kind solicitude; she arranged the lives of her family and friends as she would lilies in a vase—even if she had to snap a stem here, force a recalcitrant bud there….

As admirable example of strategic characterization and fictional grace, this novel reaffirms Mrs. Taylor's dedication to economy of means. When she describes a walk by the Thames, by God, it works in...