["Too Dear for My Possessing"] is a book of queer enchantment; of strange, astringent realism; a book stripped utterly of sentimentality but deep with feeling that is both psychic and sensuous. You are not rushed into anything. You drift along as quietly, at first, as did 13-year-old Claud Pickering in his little old boat on the stream that opened out of the Bruges Canal. A boy's world; but an exceptional boy. A boy with an unordinary endowment of sensibility, of artistic perception.

The pace quickens imperceptibly. The boy is a youth; a young man. He is married, is successful; but haunted, always, by a dream, a vision, a reality that life—or he himself or the girl who was the heart of the dream—forces into the background. Suddenly you are in the grip of tragedy, poignant, silent tragedy that makes no show; and you realize how very...