stood—­if one may be pardoned an appropriate metaphor—­upon the confectionery shelf of the fiction shop, preserved in a thick syrup and set up where a tender light could strike across it at all hours.  In story after story Miss Gale varied the same device:  that of showing how childlike children are, how sisterly are sisters, how brotherly are brothers, how motherly are mothers, how fatherly are fathers, how grandmotherly and grandfatherly are grandmothers and grandfathers, and how loverly are all true lovers of whatever age, sex, color, or condition.  But beneath the human kindness which had permitted Miss Gale to fall into this technique lay the sinews of a very subtle intelligence; and she needed only the encouragement of a changing public taste to be able to escape from her sugary preoccupations.  Though the action of Miss Lulu Bett takes place in a different village, called Warbleton, it might as well have been in Friendship—­in Friendship seen during a mood when its creator had grown weary of the eternal saccharine.  Now and then, she realized, some spirit even in Friendship must come to hate all those idyllic posturings; now and then in some narrow bosom there must flash up the fires of youth and revolution.  It is so with Lulu Bett, dim drudge in the house of her silly sister and of her sister’s pompous husband:  a breath of life catches at her and she follows it on a pitiful adventure which is all she has enough vitality to achieve but which is nevertheless real and vivid in a waste of dulness.

Here was an occasion to arraign Warbleton as Mr. Lewis was then arraigning Gopher Prairie; Miss Gale, instead of heaping up a multitude of indictments, categorized and docketed, followed the path of indirection which—­by a paradoxical axiom of art—­is a shorter cut than the highway of exposition or anathema.  Her story is as spare as the virgin frame of Lulu Bett; her style is staccato in its lucid brevity, like Lulu’s infrequent speeches; her eloquence is not that of a torrent of words and images but that of comic or ironic or tragic meaning packed in a syllable, a gesture, a dumb silence.  Miss Gale riddles the tedious affectations of the Deacon household almost without a word of comment; none the less she exhibits them under a withering light.  The daughter, she says, “was as primitive as pollen”—­and biology rushes in to explain Di’s blind philanderings.  “In the conversations of Dwight and Ina,” it is said of the husband and wife, “you saw the historical home forming in clots in the fluid wash of the community”—­and anthropology holds the candle.  Grandma Bett is, for the moment, the symbol of decrepit age, as Lulu is the symbol of bullied spinsterhood.  Yet in the midst of applications so universal the American village is not forgotten, little as it is alluded to.  If the Friendships are sweet and dainty, so are they—­whether called Warbleton or something less satiric—­dull and petty, and they fashion their Deacons no less than their Pelleases and Ettares.  Thus hinting, Miss Gale, in her clear, flutelike way, joins the chorus in which others play upon noisier instruments.