The Birmingham age-herald., 1917-06-10

we next find her in Cincinnati turned loose on the cold world with no money and no business education, adrift to make her own way; this on account of a series of disasters and mistakes and slurs and quips concerning her illigtimacy which she proudly resents and fares forth to be her own supporter.
 Later we find her in New York where the better parts of the scenes are laid.
 In New York she runs the gamut of 1evolting filth. and is dragged through all the abominations of the underworld now and then she makes a desperate attempt to earn her own living, but the horrors of tenement house life among the very poor the utter poverty, the in- decencies, the filth and vermin, the hun ger and cold and rags, drive her back to the streets with the conviction that they are no worse She falls into the hands of a cadet who is a part of the organized criminal poitco system, and her rise comes about by means of the wealth this creature, later on, amasses through politics and contracts and graft. They go to Paris and London, purposng to put their 'pasts behind them and make their way into a respectable but gay and interesting world. Susan finally becomes a famous actress.
 
 resents a woman supposed to be of un- usual mental calibre and endowments, of fine character and splendid capabili- ties, but this is hardly believable, be- cause women of that sort do not drop into the depths of vice as she did; the kind that do so are dwarfed mentally and crooked physically.
 Mr. Phillips reviewers have scored him roundly for his futile attempt to make out of Susan Lenox a heroine of real worth and value One of them has said:
 'The nose inveterate romanticist never denied and belied the facts of life more crudely than just there has MT. Phillips, bent upon utter realism. Finally, the story is grotesquely and conyentionally false to life in it's dependence upon that long ago exploded fabrication of the muckrakers of economics, that a woman can get nowhere except through sexual dependence upon man. The whole story is based upon that assumption, and it inspires characters and situations and conversations and the philosophic com- ment of the author, which he sprinkles plentifully throughout the story.
 False as it is to life in its theory and plan, although in it's specific pictures of many of the conditions of life among the very poor 1t Is often sadly true, the story Is also repulsive to the last degree. It's ngdrawn-out pages, more than 800 in eaCn or the two NOluIileS, are duouI dS IT, teresting as the report of vice commits sion. It is impossible to imagine any one reading it who Is not forced thereto by some necessity. And 1t is deplorable that MT. Phillips name and reputation should be besmirched by the mistaken post humous publication of work of such outworn and conventional falsity and of such thoroughly vicious romanticism mas uuerading as realism. When Balzac or Zola or Daudet wrote of the underworld their knowledge and their artistic sense saved them from the sin, both literary and, of maudn romanticism. They wrote with recognition of the truth and the in exorable logic of life and. therefore, their books are often as keen and terri ble and true as the lashings of one Of the old Hebrew prophets