In particular Mr. Herrick has concerned himself with the status of women in the republic which has prided itself upon nothing more than upon its attitude toward their sex, and he has regularly insisted upon carrying his researches beyond that period of green girlhood which appears to be all of a woman’s life that can interest the popular fiction-mongers.  He knows, without anywhere putting it precisely into words, that the elaborate language of compliment used by Americans toward women, though deriving perhaps from a time when women were less numerous on the frontier than men and were therefore specially prized and praised, has become for the most part a hollow language.  The pioneer woman earned all the respect she got by the equal share she bore in the tasks of her laborious world.  Her successor in the comfortable society which the frontier founded by its travail neither works nor breeds as those first women did.  But the energy thus happily released, instead of being directed into other useful channels, has been encouraged to spend itself upon the complex arts of the parasite.

Ascribe it to the vanity of men who choose to regard women as luxurious chattels and the visible symptoms of success; ascribe it to a wasteful habit practised by a nation never compelled to make the best use of its resources; ascribe it to the craft of a sex quick to seize its advantage after centuries of disadvantage—­ascribe it to whatever one will, the fact remains that the United States has evolved a widely admired type of woman who lacks the glad animal spontaneity of the little girl, the ardent abandon of the mistress, the strong loyalty of the wife, the deep, calm, fierce instincts of the mother; and who even lacks—­although here a change has taken place since Mr. Herrick began to chronicle her—­the confident impulse to follow her own path as an individual, irrespective of her peculiar functions.  It must be remembered, of course, that Mr. Herrick has had in mind not the vast majority of women, who in the United States as everywhere else on earth still fully participate in life, but the American Woman, that traditional figure compounded of timid ice and dainty insolence and habitually tricked out with a wealth which holds the world so far away that it cannot see how empty she really is.  He has sought in his novels, by dissecting the pretty simulacrum, to show that it has little blood and less soul.

At times he writes with a biting animus.  In One Woman’s Life Milly schemes herself out of the plain surroundings into which she was born, lapses from her designs enough to marry a poor man for love but subsequently wrecks his career and wears him out by her ambitious ignorance, and before she ends the story in the arms of another husband has contrived to waste the savings of a friend of her own sex who tries to help her.  In The Healer the doctor’s wife continually drags him back from the passionate exercise of his true gift, luring him with her beauty