Joseph Hergesheimer, an Essay in Interpretation

Now the fifth, and incomparably the finest and loveliest, of the Hergesheimer novels is _Linda Condon_, which renders self-confessedly a story of "the old service of beauty, of the old gesture toward the stars"-"here never to be won, never to be realized"-of the service which "only beauty knows and possesses".... For _Linda Condon_ is to be valued less as the life-history of a woman than as the depiction-curt, incisive, and yet pitying-of a shrine that, however transiently, was hallowed.

At the exacting workaday pursuit of being a human being this Linda fails, fails chilled and wistful. She has, like more of us than dare proclaim the defect, no talent whatever for heart-felt living, so that most persons seem but to pass grayly upon the horizon of her consciousness, like unintelligible wraiths gesticulating,-and always remaining somehow disjunct and not gravely important,-the while that all the needs and obligations of one's corporal life must be discharged with an ever-present sense of their queer triviality. Toward nobody, neither toward Linda Condon's mother nor lover, nor husband, nor children, may she, the real Linda, quite entertain any sense of actual attachment, far less of intimacy....