Publisher's Synopsis
There are two distinct themes of interest in the story: the abnormal passion of an ill-balanced girl for Horace Allen, the young school-superintendent; and the secret, sternly repressed, remorse of Sylvia Whitman for a fancied wrong to Rose Fletcher, the pretty child-like young girl, around whom both plots center. The dramatic incidents of the story are connected with this less commonplace theme of the abnormal love of Lucy Ayres and her attempts at arsenic murder from jealousy: but our sympathy and interest are aroused far more by the story of middle-aged Henry Whitman and his wife Sylvia, who reach their good fortune so late in life that the sweetness of attainment has been embittered by delay. The love-story of Rose Fletcher and Horace Allen, with a few minor exceptions the only happy figures in the book, the burden of whose world has not warped in some unsightly fashion, gives a needed touch of brightness to the otherwise somber tale.
The portrayal of Lucy Ayres herself, pretty, pathetic, her ill-controlled passions carrying her over the border-land of insanity, is splendid and convincing. But in the telling of her story and the decidedly improbable incidents connected with it, Mrs. Freeman has used a restrained style that rather repels sympathy and acceptance on the part of the reader. One rather resents, also, the fact of a second case of unnatural craving for love in the same book, that of the too mysterious Miss Farrel for the harassed young superintendent. As to the young man himself, we are inclined to agree with Mr. Week's expostulation, "What in creation is the fellow, anyhow? Are all the women going daft over him? He isn't half bad looking, and he's a good sport, but I'm hanged if I can see why he should upset every woman who looks at him." Throughout this part of the book, which embodies most of the dramatic action, and which is the more individual and presents the less hackneyed problems and burdens of life, there is a harshness and a matter-of-fact treatment of the unusual and the disagreeable that at the same time curiously repels and convinces.
On the other hand, Henry and Sylvia Whitman are presented with a sympathy and humorous pathos that make them linger tenderly in our memory of the book. In them we have an every-day middle-aged village couple, sturdy, undemonstrative, hardworking, almost lacking in humor, but full of shrewd common-sense, endued with decided individuality and lovableness by the author's appreciative understanding of their faults and inconsistencies as well as their real worth. Sylvia is the real heroine of the book, raised from an ordinary plain little old woman to that height by the power of fancied guilt finally confessed, after a year of stifled remorse and stern repression. The delightful inconsistencies of her character, and the passionate love for Rose which she is incapable of expressing, make her a vital human figure. Henry Whitman is also given splendidly; a mildly heroic, slightly tragic, altogether likable character, with many well-drawn touches of the eternal masculine about him. It is in these two characters and their love for the pretty Rose that the charm and real appeal of the book lie. The concise unadorned style of the telling is curiously suited to the story of their homely lives, and we feel a greater sympathy for their sturdy strength than for Lucy Ayres and Miss Farrel, whose slender shoulders were unable to bear their burdens. For Mrs. Freeman in her last paragraph elaborates her title-theme, and emphasises it. "Every one bore, unseen or seen, the burden of his or her world upon straining shoulders. The grand pathetic tragedy inseparable from life, which Atlas symbolised, moved multiple at the marriage feast, and yet love would in the end sanctify it for them all." ....
-"The Wellesley College Magazine," Volume 17 [1908]