Introducing Mrs. Martin, a bright, cheerful, little bit of a woman, at a booksellers’ convention in New York, William Hard declared that she and Margaret Deland were like two large railroad systems each operating exclusively in its own territory by a tacit understanding. Mrs. Martin, to accept the simile, freights great quantities of valuable stuff and yields far better dividends than some of the big transcontinental lines!
Books by Helen R. Martin
Elusive Hildegarde.
Her Husband’s Purse.
His Courtship.
Warren Hyde.
Tillie, a Mennonite Maid, 1904.
Sabina, a Story of the Amish, 1905.
The Betrothal of Elypholate and Other Tales of the Pennsylvania Dutch, 1907.
The Revolt of Anne Royle, 1908.
The Crossways, 1910.
When Half-Gods Go, 1911.
The Fighting Doctor, 1912.
The Parasite, 1913.
Barnabetta, 1914.
For a Mess of Pottage, 1915.
Martha of the Mennonite Country, 1915.
Those Fitzenbergers, 1917.
Gertie Swartz: Fanatic or Christian? 1918.
Maggie of Virginsburg, 1918.
The Schoolmaster of Hessville, 1920.
The Marriage of Susan, 1921.
Mrs. Martin’s books are published by Doubleday, Page & Company, New York, and the Century Company, New York.
CHAPTER XVIII
SOPHIE KERR
“July 19, 1918.
“My dear Mr. Overton:
“IT has been almost impossible for me to write this. I have made a dozen beginnings and invariably found myself drifting off into reminiscences of my childhood and funny lies about what I think and feel. Good heavens! what do I think and feel? I don’t know. I really don’t. I have never had the time nor found myself of sufficient interest to sit down and think about myself subjectively. I am afraid that this is a very queer narrative and very dull, but at least I have tried to give only facts....
“I was born near Denton, Maryland, a small town located in the ‘sandy belt’ of the Eastern Shore. It is a narrow-minded, kind-hearted, conventional, self-respecting community, not very enterprising—an average little semi-Southern town. My father had a nursery and fruit farm, and cared more, I think, for beautiful trees than he did for people. We had lovely arborvitæ and red japonica hedges, magnolia trees, an extraordinary collection of evergreens, and many unusual foreign flowering shrubs.
“I went to school at Denton, the public school, and the embryo High School of twenty to twenty-five years ago. And then I went to college.