Without question the particular triumph of these novels is the women who appear in them.  Decorative art in fiction has perhaps never gone farther than with Taou Yuen, the marvelous Manchu woman brought home from Shanghai to Salem as wife of a Yankee skipper in Java Head.  She may be taken as focus and symbol of Mr. Hergesheimer’s luxurious inclinations.  By her bewildering complexity of costume, by her intricate ceremonial observances, by the impenetrability of her outward demeanor, she belongs rather to art than to life—­an Oriental Galatea radiantly adorned but not wholly metamorphosed from her native marble.  Only at intervals does some glimpse or other come of the tender flesh shut up in her magnificent garments or of the tender spirit schooled by flawless, immemorial discipline to an absolute decorum.  That such glimpses come just preserves her from appearing a mere figure of tapestry, a fine mechanical toy.  The Salem which before her arrival seems quaintly formal enough immediately thereafter seems by contrast raw and new, and her beauty glitters like a precious gem in some plain man’s house.

Much the same effect, on a less vivid scale, is produced in The Three Black Pennys by the presence on the Pennsylvania frontier—­it is almost that—­of Ludowika Winscombe, who has always lived at Court and who brings new fragrances, new dainty rites, into the forest; and in Mountain Blood by the presence among the Appalachian highlands of that ivory, icy meretrix Meta Beggs who plans to drive the best possible bargain for her virgin favors.  Meta carries the decorative traits of Mr. Hergesheimer’s women to the point at which they suggest the marionette too much; by his methods, of course, he habitually runs the risk of leaving the flesh and blood out of his women.  He leaves out, at least, with no fluttering compunctions, any special concern for the simpler biological aspects of the sex:  “It was not what the woman had in common with a rabbit that was important, but her difference.  On one hand that difference was moral, but on the other aesthetic; and I had been absorbed by the latter.”  “I couldn’t get it into my head that loveliness, which had a trick of staying in the mind at points of death when all service was forgotten, was rightly considered to be of less importance than the sweat of some kitchen drudge.”

Such robust doctrine is a long way from the customary sentimentalism of novelists about maids, wives, mothers, and widows.  Indeed, Mr. Hergesheimer, like Poe before him, inclines very definitely toward beauty rather than toward humanity, where distinctions may be drawn between them.  In Linda Condon, however, his most remarkable creation, he has brought humanity and beauty together in an intimate fusion.  Less exotic than Taou Yuen, Linda, with her straight black bang and her extravagant simplicity of taste, is no less exquisite.  And like Taou Yuen she affords Mr. Hergesheimer the opportunity he most desires—­“to