[In the following review of Etched in Moonlight, the critic notes the use of the moral in Stephens's fiction.]

[Etched in Moonlight] is a haunted house among the many mansions of contemporary fiction. Here is, indeed, psychological discrimination enough to compare with the usual mode of portraying what is passing, but Mr. Stephens essays a remoter region of personal complexities than is usual. One would not lightly decide whether his characters were in the flesh or in the spirit. He pursues invisibles and imponderables with a passionate insistency, and is a willing watcher of the conventions of the world of dreams, refusing to assume that our waking logic and habit are absolutely more valuable than the seeming incoherency of that other universe. Enlightened with this independence of view, he stands out as a strangely luminous and complete recorder of dream scenes, characters and crises, in which he has the power of comprehending the undercurrents of feeling, such as usually baffle the waking effort of memory, in a minute way. This distant consciousness also expatiates in the world of everyday affairs, whether in the way of imagination or in actual impression, and has the effect of making almost all his stories appear dream-like and certainly “etched in moonlight.”

The title-piece of this collection of silver-lighted shades is particularly notable for its protracted curiosity in the Utopia to which sleep admits the mind of man, for its detached clarity of statement, and for its elaborate revocations of the inward motives and moods of the persons in the dream—the narrator, who though identical in individuality with the “I” of the vision, is yet remote in diurnal course from that “I,” and “those two who walked like gods on the earth and who stirred like worms in my mind.” The campaign of these three mysteries is created under the shadow of an unsubstantial castle: “Perfect, although in the hub and centre of ruin, a vast edifice reared against the sky, and it shone white as snow in the moonlight except where a projecting battlement threw an ebon shade.” This magnetic tower dominates the eccentric dream-jealousies and interplay of the triangle (for even in dreams the triangle seems eternal); and Mr. Stephens's feat is that he examines the phases of the case as though they were not eccentric. Among the other stories, with their intermittent lustre of language and suddenness of episode, that called “The Boss” suggests itself very readily as displaying the incursion of the dream into waking life, as Mr. Stephens represents it. “The Boss” is, in a practical estimate, a report of an angry interview between a manager with what is known as “shrewd business acumen” and a man whom he is about to dismiss. The latter has come prepared to thrash the manager, and is on the point of doing so. The manager's hand hangs over the bell. He removes it without ringing. The fight is off, the electricity in the air dies away. This anti-climax of action might be astonishing, and one might disbelieve, but the inconsequence of dreams has intervened. The fantastic twist of another kind of interview has solved the problem. In this, as elsewhere, Mr. Stephens brings from the farther psychology a moral for what is near at hand.