He rose and stretched.
'Maybe,' he said, addressing a huge chocolate-colored bust of an Indian lady, 'maybe I can catch up to those fellows some time—but not here. Noon, I bet,'—looking at his watch,—'and it is to eat.'
He contemplated the Mantegna baby.
'So long,' he said, 'you're running things,' and snapped his watch.
BIOGRAPHICAL AND INTERPRETATIVE
NOTES
THE PRELIMINARIES
Cornelia A. P. Comer, accomplished critic, essayist, and writer of short stories, was educated at Vassar, and afterwards engaged in journalistic work in the Middle West and California. She now lives in Seattle.
The plot of The Preliminaries might readily be told in a single paragraph. Its significance lies in its lucid and austere psychology. The young Mr. Oliver Pickersgill appears in four distinct situations; and as we watch him in company with the four dominating and diverse personalities in turn, we are engrossed in the swift and poignant play of his feelings—feelings which finally deepen into a sincere and settled consciousness of attained truth and a confident loyalty to an imprisoned convict. The verisimilitude of both situation and conversation is complete; and in the process there is no exhaustion of emotional values. Henry James would not have treated the situations with more clarity.