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“Madam Sapphira”[22] is a vivid study in unchastened womanhood. We see but little of the lady in the 251 pages of this “Fifth Avenue Story”; her character is exposed to us through the experiences of her poor fool husband, who colloquially would be called a simp, by denizens of the Low World a boob. He redeems himself to some extent by sending Madam Sapphira a belated bouquet of cyanide of potassium. On the whole, though characters and phrases in his work might be brought forward to prove the contrary, Mr. Saltus obviously has a low opinion of women and thinks that men do better without them. The greater part of the time he appears to agree with Posthumus:

“Could I find out
The woman’s part in me! For there’s no motion
That tends to vice in man but I affirm
It is the woman’s part; be it lying, note it
The woman’s; flattering, hers; deceiving, hers;
Lust and rank thoughts, hers, hers; revenges, hers;
Ambitions, covetings, changes of prides, disdain,
Nice longings, slanders, mutability,
All faults that may be named, nay that hell knows,
Why, hers, in part or all; but rather, all;
For even to vice
They are not constant, but are changing still
One vice of a minute old for one
Not half so old as that. I’ll write against them,
Detest them, curse them.–Yet ’tis greater skill
In a true hate, to pray they have their will:
The very devils cannot plague them better.”

[Footnote 22: F. Tennyson Neely; 1893.]

“Enthralled, a story of international life setting forth the curious circumstances concerning Lord Cloden and Oswald Quain”:[23] a mad opus this, an insane phantasmagoria of crime, avarice, and murder. For the second time in this author’s novels incest plays a role. This time it is real. Quain is indeed the half-brother of the lady who desires to marry him. He is as vile and virulent a villain as any who stalks through the pages of Ann Ker, Eliza Bromley, or Mrs. Radcliffe. A Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde motive is sounded. An ugly man comes back from London a handsome fellow after visits to a certain doctor who rearranges the lines of his face. The transformation is effected every day now (some of our prominent actresses are said to have benefited by this operation), but in 1894 the mechanism of the trick must have been appallingly creaky. This story, indeed, borders on the burlesque and has almost as much claim to the title as “The Green Carnation.” Was the author laughing at the Eighteen Nineties? The period is subtly evoked in one detail, constantly reiterated in Saltus’s early books: ladies and gentlemen when they leave a room “push aside the portieres.” Sometimes the “rings jingle.” He has in most instances mercifully spared us further descriptions of the interiors of New York houses at this epoch…. At a dinner party one of the guests refers to Howells as the “foremost novelist who is never read.” The book is dedicated to “Cherubina, dulcissime rerum.” Saltus returned to the central theme of “Enthralled” in a story called “The Impostor,” printed in “Ainslee’s” for May, 1917.

[Footnote 23: Tudor Press: 1894.]

“When Dreams Come True”[24] again brings us in touch with Tancred Ennever, the stupid hero of “The Transient Guest.” In the meantime he has become an almost intolerable prig. It is probable that Saltus meant more by this fable than he has let appear. The roar of the waves on the coast of Lesbos is distinctly audible for a time and the denoument seems to belong to quite another story…. Ennever has turned author. We are informed that he has completed studies on Huysmans and Leconte de Lisle; he is also engaged on a “Historia Amoris.” There is an interesting passage relating to the names of great writers. Alphabet Jones assures us that they are always “in two syllables with the accent on the first. Oyez: Homer, Sappho, Horace, Dante, Petrarch, Ronsard, Shakespeare, Hugo, Swinburne … Balzac, Flaubert, Huysmans, Michelet, Renan.” The reader is permitted to add … “Saltus”!