Publisher's Synopsis
Wilfred Hornby, son of the vicar, spends his youth inside of a shell, and this is the story of his hatching; His first breaking away from accepted family standards comes when his chance meeting with Nellie Roberts develops into a clandestine love affair. "I feel no kind of shame or regret now when I think of it," he writes-and with that the interlude drops from the book. Hornby's engagement to his cousin Gladys terminates as abruptly when that young lady proves true to her cardboard standards and marries a more prosperous suitor. Hornby forthwith takes lodgings in semi-respectable Keppel Street, fastens his architect's plate on the door and spends the next year looking for an opening. The rest of the book is concerned with this year, and revolves around the inmates of the Keppel Street house, Hornby's "house mates." Of these Judith is the center. Hornby loves her from their first unfortunate meeting when he makes the unforgivable mistake of classing her with the pseudo-"actress" of the second floor front. As a consequence of this error Hornby wins the stubborn hatred of Judith's friend Helen, who fights him at first openly, later secretly, even to the point of offering herself as a supreme sacrifice to open the eyes of her friend. The struggle for Judith and for idealism in his art give the plot its substance. Incidentally the life of the Keppel Street house, with its odd assortment of inmates is as vital a part of the book as the main thread of the story, for "House Mates" shows life not as a rounded entity, but as a succession without much neatness or finish and with no beginning and no stopping place-not even death.
If, however, the book has no great central purpose, so that there seems to be no place where the reviewer can take hold, it brings out two big Beresford ideas-freedom from restraint, whether that restraint be stereotyped art or stereotyped thought, and democracy. It is thru the lodgers in Keppel Street that Hornby comes to feel democracy with his heart-a very different sensation from the mental acknowledgment of its reasonableness. For it is only the people who are a trifle "up against it" who really know the meaning of fraternity. It makes one glad to have known the sensation.
Incidentally, though, - isn't Hornby's attitude toward his early affair with Nellie Roberts a trifle undemocratic? It is in such contrast with his righteous exasperation when Helen questions his honorable intentions toward Judith.
"House-Mates" is a stimulating piece of work, without the warmth, perhaps, of "These Lynnckers," but with equal evidence of the author's secure ability to do his own thinking.
-The Publishers Weekly, Vol. 92 [1917]
