[L. P. Hartley cares] seriously for truth, but in [Simonetta Perkins] human nature becomes, without falsification, something not easily recognizable…. Mr. Hartley's [feeling is] for the queer impulses which urge a character into actions on a superficial view uncharacteristic, but ironically appropriate. [He] creates people whom we cannot know completely, as we may know the puppets of the ordinary competent novelist: there remains, with … Mr. Hartley, the possibility of some disturbing twist of the mind. (p. 542)

[The subject of Simonetta Perkins] is the reaction of an American girl, Miss Johnstone, to what is most essentially Venetian. "No one knows where they are with me, because they really aren't anywhere, I am forever making up my mind about myself," she writes in her diary: Mr. Hartley gives us the process…. [He] has a remarkable talent for recording the twists of thought, the uneasy developments of emotion, in such characters...