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“And behold, a woman in the city, which was a sinner, when she knew that Jesus sat at meat in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster box of ointment, and stood at his feet behind him weeping, and began to wash his feet with tears, and did wipe them with the hairs of her head, and kissed his feet and anointed them with ointment.”

How stale, flat and unprofitable the modern stories of semi- repentant prostitutes beside that pathetic passage, which shears down into the very soul–penetrates to the profoundest depths of the sacred Lake of Tears! And yet this ultra-orthodox age–which would suppress the ICONOCLAST if it could for poking fun at Poll Parrot preachers–has not become crazed over Mary Magdalen– has not so much as named a canal-boat or a cocktail for her.

Du Maurier says of his heroine: “With her it was lightly come and lightly go and never come back again. . . . Sheer gayety of heart and genial good fellowship, the difficulty of saying nay to earnest pleading . . . so little did she know of love’s heartaches and raptures and torments and clingings and jealousies,” etc. A woman who had never been in love, yet confessed to criminal intimacy with three men–and was not yet at the end of her string! Not even the pride of dress, the scourge of need, the fire-whips of passion to urge her on, she sinned, as the Yankees would say, simply “to be a-doin’ “–broke the Seventh Commandment “more in a frolicsome spirit of camaraderie than anything else.” That’s the way we used to kill people in Texas. Still I opine that when a young woman gets so awfully jolly that she distributes her favors around promiscuously just to put people in a good humor, she’s a shaky piece of furniture to make a fad of–a doubtful example to be commended from the pulpit to America’s young daughters. The French enthusiasts once crowned a courtesan in Notre Dame as Goddess of Reason and worshiped her; but I was hardly prepared to see the American people enthrone another as Goddess of Respectability and become hysterical in their devotion. I am no he-prude. I have probably said as many kindly things of fallen womanhood as Du Maurier himself, but I dislike to see a rotten drab deified. I dislike to see a great publishing house like that of Harper & Bros. so indifferent to decency, so careless of moral consequences, that, for the sake of gain, it will turn loose upon this land the foul liaisons of the French capital. I dislike to see the mothers of the next generation of Americans trying to “make up” to resemble the counterfeit presentment of a brazen bawd. It indicates that our entire social system is sadly in need of fumigation–such as Sodom and Gomorrah received.

Trilby, the child of a bummy preacher and a bastard bar- maid, was born and bred in the slum of the wickedest city in the world. Little was to be expected of such birth and breeding. We are not surprised that she regards fornication as but a venial fault–like cigarette smoking–and sins “capriciously, desultorily, more in a frolicsome spirit of camaraderie than anything else.” Girls so reared are apt to be a trifle frolicsome. We are not shocked to see her stripped stark naked in Carrel’s atelier in the presence of half a hundred hoodlums of the Latin quarter–seeming as unconcerned as a society belle at opera or ball with half her back exposed, her bust ready to spill itself out of her corsage if she chance to stoop. We even feel that it is in perfect accord with the eternal fitness of things when these wild sprouts of Bohemia, “with kindly solicitude, help her on with her clothes.” We can even pause to admire the experienced skill with which they put each garment in its proper place–and deftly button it. That she should have the ribald slang of the free-and-easy neighborhood at her tongue’s end and be destitute of delicacy as a young cow might be expected; but we are hardly prepared to see one grown up among such surroundings so unutterably stupid as not to know when her companions are “guying” her. Trilby croaking “Ben Bolt” for the edification of les trois Angliches were a sight worthy of a lunatic asylum. It was even more ridiculous than the social performance of that other half-wit, Little Billee, in Carrel’s atelier. Stupidity covers even more sins than charity, hence we should not judge Du Maurier’s heroine too harshly. As weak intellects yield readily to hypnotic power, Svengali had an easy victim. I have no word of criticism for the poor creature. I do not blame Du Maurier for drawing her as he found–or imagined–her, nor can I blame popular preachers, “able editors” and half-wit women for worshiping the freckled and faulty grisette as a goddess; for does not Carlyle truly tell us that “what we see, and can not see over, is good as Infinity?” Still I cannot entertain an exalted opinion of either the intelligence or morals of a people who will place such a character on a pedestal and prostrate themselves before it.