POSSESSING PRUDENCE
Amy Wentworth Stone is a resident of Boston, who combines a pleasant sense of the ludicrous with a rare understanding of the spirit of childhood.
This miniature sketch of Amy Wentworth Stone's is admirably handled, and sparkles with the best and kindliest humor—a humor that is in no sense spoiled by the sins that rest so lightly upon the imaginative soul of little Prudence Jane. Her sins hark quickly back to the childhood periods of each reader who sympathetically remembers the world of fancy which conflicted so loudly with dull realism. The charm of this humorous tracery will invite a rereading of Miss Stone's similar triumph in Capital Punishments, published in the Atlantic for November, 1913.
THE GLORY-BOX
Elizabeth Ashe is the pen name of Georgiana Pentlarge, a young and promising story-writer living in Boston.
The Glory-Box is an unforgettable story. Its accuracy in the matter of minor household details and commonplace neighborliness creates an atmosphere of intimate realism which readily wins our sympathetic credence in situation and event. We grow easily familiar with the three or four characters who are introduced, and then we discover our interest centering in two of these—Eunice, the sweetheart, and Stephen, the lover—as, in their separated lives, each in fancy penetrates the daily routine and comes fondly to rest in thoughts and plans of marriage. The story interest is enhanced by the contrast of their daily routine. Eunice's time is spent in teaching, relieved by friendly village companionship; Stephen's in the arduous work of the Columbia Law School, relieved by glimpses of fashionable life in Washington Square. All this routine and hope and relaxation end in the tragedy that the earlier realism of the story grimly accentuates and intensifies. The art of the story lies in the author's quiet control of situations which might so easily, in the hands of a lesser craftsman, run a riotous course in the field of pseudo-sentiment.
THE SPIRIT OF THE HERD
Dallas Lore Sharp, well known as a keen observer both of nature and of human nature, is Professor of English at Boston University.