in _The Bookman_, Dr. Frederic Taber Cooper said, "In this last field
(the society novel) it would seem as though Mr. Chambers had, at length,
found himself; and the fact that the last of the four books is the best
and most sustained and most honest piece of work he has yet done affords
solid ground for the belief that he has still better and maturer volumes
yet to come. There is no valid reason why Mr. Chambers should not
ultimately be remembered as the novelist who left behind him a
comprehensive human comedy of New York."
This is another novel of society life like "The Fighting Chance" and "The
Firing Line." The chief characters in the story are a boy and a girl,
inheritors of a vast fortune, whose parents are dead, and who have been
left in the guardianship of a large Trust Company. They are brought up
with no companions of their own age and are a unique pair when turned
out, on coming of age, into New York society--two children educated by a
great machine, possessors of fabulous wealth, with every inherited
instinct for good and evil set free for the first time. The fact that the
girl has acquired the habit of dropping a little cologne on a lump of
sugar and nibbling it when tired or depressed gives an indication of the
struggle that the children have before them, a struggle of their own, in
the midst of their luxurious surroundings, more vital, more real,
perhaps, than any that Mr. Chambers has yet depicted. It is a tense,
powerful, highly dramatic story, handling a delicate subject without
offense to the taste or the judgment of the most critical reader.