In "A Short History of Love and Marriage"—and how woefully short sometimes is the history of a love and how short too, perhaps, the history of a marriage!—she shows to us that for all its admitted shortness the narrative is properly rounded out. For on page 24 we learn that the happy couple went on a bridal tour to India and "seven hours after they got there had two twin babies." Seven hours and two twin babies, a magnificent showing surely and the prevalent rage for shortness maintained to the very end! Page 24 is one of the very best pages in this book, containing, as it also does, a painstaking description of perhaps the most striking and interesting marriage-morn costume worn by any bridegroom in the Christian era.
It is not my intention to quote over-liberally from the contents of this volume. To my way of thinking the trick of inserting copious extracts from a novel into the foreword of that novel is as great a mistake as though I invited you to my house for dinner and before dinner gave you tidbits and choice bites from each course. I should merely be dulling your appetite, without satisfying your hunger.
My aim is to direct your attention, if I may make so bold, to certain pages, specifying them by their numbers and trusting that when you have progressed so far you will, in the reading of them, find the same joy and the same zest that I have found there. For example, on page 46 I respectfully invite your consideration to the pains taken in enumerating the various articles of one Sylvia's running-away or elopement trousseau. There was a thorough young woman for you, and a provident.
On page 87 occurs mention of two sisters and here, despite my promise of two paragraphs ago, I cannot resist the temptation to quote one short but tremendously illuminating line. The author is speaking now of two sisters and of the elder she says, she "was by no means beautiful but she was intensely good." How often it happens that those who are by no means beautiful are intensely good—how often and sometimes oh, how easy for them to be so good. But most of us, even those who educate our faculties of observation the better to earn a living thereby, are very much older than eleven years before we discern this great truth.
I think the brightest gems of all this collection are to be found, in the greatest profusion, in "The Hangman's Daughter." The ill-fated gentleman hangman, Mr. Winston, who moved to Kenelham "where only about two people were hung a year" is in my opinion worthy to be rated with the deathless and ever-to-be glorious Mr. Salteena. Miss Ashford says she was shocked when her brothers on hearing the trial scene read (pages 150, 151, 152) laughed at what she had conceived to be a tragic and dramatic passage in the action of her tale. Later, no doubt, she has come to realize how dangerous a thing it is for one to acquire, either intentfully or otherwise, the reputation of being a humorist; for when he who has been branded as a humorist says a thing with desire to be serious his friends laugh at it as a most rare whimsicality and when, on the other hand, he deliberately sets out to be humorous, his enemies very likely will declare that never before in all his life was he quite so serious. And had her brothers been older, had they been of an age to appreciate the unconscious comedy that marked the Dreyfus trial, say, or had they ever had opportunity to hear the proceedings in sundry murder trials in America, when learned counsel was asking questions and learned alienists were making answers, they would have been able to appreciate the fact that no burlesque description of a murder trial can ever be quite so utterly comic as a real murder trial sometimes is.
A flashing jewel of dramatic intensity awaits you (pages 229 to 234 inclusive) when you come to read of the rescue of Gladys and Helen from the grasp of the murderer of Helen's own dear father and of the method employed by Gladys' heroic brother for detaining the miscreant Likewise, I pray you, reader dear, that you linger on page 257 wherein the "menu of the table d'hote" which was "of nightly recurrence" at Lord Beaufort's castle, is printed in full. In my mind's eye I see little Miss Daisy Ashford, twelve years old going on thirteen, carefully bearing away with her the card of the first meal she ever ate in a regular restaurant and taking it home and treasuring it up against the time when she might insert it into her greatest story, then in process of incubation, at exactly the appointed spot to create the most telling effect, under the most appropriate possible circumstances. Could a proper respect and a proper instinct for local color rise to greater heights? I deny it. So too will you deny it when you arrive at page 258 and read the words emphasized by being displayed in capitals that are on that page at the end of the menu.
Personally I do not think that as a whole this book is equal to "The Young Visiters." Only once in a decade or so is it vouchsafed the writing craft that one among us shall create a masterpiece, destined in time to become a classic and a thing immortal. Only once in an eon or so is it vouchsafed a writer to write a masterpiece at the age of nine years. Very few among us ever produce a second perfect work on top of a first one. But this I will say—every line in this book is worthy to have been written by the same hand that wrote "The Young Visiters" and that, I think, is praise enough for any writer.
New York, April, 1920.