In the following excerpt, West briefly examines the characters of the two doctors in "The White Horses of Vienna," finding the older one a leaderless elitist, comparable to the Lipizzaner horses Heine so admires, and judging Heine a pitiable but nonetheless admirable romantic.

A good example, and also an example of Miss Boyle at her best, is her short story "The White Horses of Vienna," which won the O. Henry Memorial Prize in 1935. The surface events of the story are slight, involving little more than the visit of a young Jewish doctor to the isolated office of an Austrian Nazi, to substitute while the Nazi doctor is incapacitated by an injured leg. The Nazi doctor presents a puppet show which betrays his political sympathies at a time prior to the German-Austrian Anschluss and which also portrays his own attitude toward his young medical colleague. The young Jew...