Of course it's sentimental, and it begs the question a good deal; but it imagines something heroic in character, and it makes the reader imagine it too.

The man who wrote that book may be a donkey half the time, but he's a genius the other half.

By-and-by he'll do something--after he's come to see that his 'Maiden Knight' was a fool--that I believe even you won't be down on, Mr.March, if he paints a heroic type as powerfully as he does in this book." He spoke with the authority of a journalist, and though he deferred to March in the end, he deferred with authority still.

March liked him for coming to the defence of a young writer whom he had not himself learned to like yet.

"Yes," he said, "if he has the power you say, and can keep it after he comes to his artistic consciousness!" Mrs.Leffers, as if she thought things were going her way, smiled; Rose Adding listened with shining eyes expectantly fixed on March; his mother viewed his rapture with tender amusement.