testify none the less to the affection with which this novelist feels his world and the lucidity with which he represents it.  He has a genuine zest for human life, enjoying it, even when it invites mirth or anger, because of the form and color and movement which he perceives everywhere and particularly because of the solid texture of reality of which he is admirably aware.  Hatred closes the eyes to a multitude of charms.  If Mr. Dell suffered from it he could never have enriched his fabric as he has with so many circumstances chosen with an unargumentative hand; he could never have extracted so much drama out of dusty people.  Had he been a sentimentalist he might have fallen into the soft processes of the local color school when it came to portraying the various communities through which Felix takes his way.  Instead, the story is everywhere stiffened with intelligence.  Felix has no adventures more exciting than his successive discoveries of new ideas.  Even the women he loves fit into the pattern of his career as a thinking being, and he emerges, however moved, with a surer grasp of his expanding universe.  That grasp would lack much of its confidence if Mr. Dell employed a style less masterly.  As it is, he writes with a candid lucidity which everywhere lets in the light and with a grace which rounds off the edges that mark the pamphlet but not the work of art.  He can be at once downright and graceful, at once sincere and impersonal, at once revolutionary and restrained, at once impassioned and reflective, at once enamored of truth and scrupulous for beauty.

When Felix Fay had escaped his original villages and had taken to the wider pursuit of freedom in Chicago there was another chapter of his career to be recorded; and that Mr. Dell sets down in The Briary-Bush, wherein Felix finds that the trail of freedom ends, for him, in madness and loneliness.  From the first, though this moon-calf has steadily blundered toward detachment from the common order, some aching instinct has left him hungry for solid ground to stand on.  The conflict troubles him.  He can succeed in his immediate occupations but he cannot understand his powers or feel confident in his future.  His world whirls round and round, menaces, eludes, threatens to vanish altogether.  Thrown by dim forces into the arms of Rose-Ann, who seeks freedom no less restlessly than he, he is married, and the two begin their passionate experiment at a union which shall have no bonds but their common determination to be free.  Charming slaves of liberty!  Felix is at heart a Puritan and cannot take the world lightly, as it comes.  His blunders bruise and wound him.  He punishes himself for all his vagaries.  Rose-Ann is not a Puritan, but she too has instincts that will not surrender, any more than Felix’s, to the doctrines which they both profess:  jealousy sleeps within her, and potential motherhood.  She and Felix come to feel that they have shirked life by their deliberate childlessness and that life has deserted them.  Yet separation proves unendurable.  So they resume marriage, vowing “not to be afraid of life or of any of the beautiful things life may bring.”  Among these, of course, are to be children and a house.