Miss Harraden's last story deals with the ambitions and jealousies
of professional musicians. Truly they would seem a class apart, tiresome lovable children of genius, their moral nature undermined by envy, their hearts warmed and their tempers inflamed by their emotional art. Their vagaries make good reading, but what is true of them is not true of the ordinary grown-up world of workaday men and women. The heroine learns while still a girl "that success, however legitimate in life, is almost always achieved at the price of someone's suffering ; that jealousy springs up like some evil weed in the fairest garden, unexpected, unaccountable, in- eradicable." That English people, as a whole, are not artistic is an accepted generalization. Perhaps it would be more true to say that definitely artistic society is not very English.
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