Abstract

Dreams and the Main Chance

This article presents information on three books, "The House of Conrad," by Elias Tobenkin, "Eastern Red," by Helen Huntington and "The Golden Block," by Sophie Kerr. "Eastern Red" is a study of marriage as a prison-house in which women are hopelessly confined by walls of convention and doors of habit. The chief persons are two New York women of strongly contrasting types. Elsie Harcourt is the selfish and childless and "temperamental" wife of a rich and dissolute man of good family. Rose Durand is of lower middle-class origin, a vaudeville singer and wife of a vaudeville "actor." Elsie is the fashionable woman unfulfilled, who seeks refuge from boredom in an intense activity about nothings. "The Golden Block" is a story unworthy of comment because it exults with well-nigh unparalleled ingenuousness, or frankness, in the ability of woman to tackle man's game and beat him at it. To the heroine's admired and explicit doctrine that "there's no brains in sex" is joined the implicit corollary that there's no morals in sex either. She is out for "money and power and success and a big business to manage for herself," and no soft feminine scruples are to stand in the way.