Anthony Patch is a modern New York exquisite and dilettante, an heir to great riches. He falls in love with Gloria, a girl of spirit, who lives for her own beauty. The clashes of their personalities after marriage lead to domestic "scenes," and their moral indolence, weakened by fast and showy living, cannot overcome the shadows which deepen between them. The loss of Anthony's expectations, service in a war training camp, and a disastrous flirtation, bring out the essential weakness of his character—everything that should steel it merely breaks through his will. The characters of this hapless degenerate and of his wife are keenly analysed and relentlessly traced by Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald in "The Beautiful and Damned' (Collins, Sons, and Ca., 7s, 6d. net).
Mr. Fitzgerald has borrowed Mr. Compton Mackenzie'y microscope, but he has adjusted the focus 10 uneven more intense and minute clarity. The story is told in tense and stabbing English. Every character. lives and could be recognised. The technique is well knit, and the tragedy marches to its finality with all fitting sense of the inevitable—although the actual ending, in point of fact, leaves just a little too much to the imagination of -the reader. The pages abound with illuminating similes, telling word-pictures, with an epigram. This ruthless study of the crime of idleness ranks among the most interesting of the season's novels.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.