AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION
BY
BEATRICE MARSHALL
NEW YORK
JOHN LANE COMPANY
MCMXII
Copyright, 1912, by
JOHN LANE COMPANY
PREFACE
Readers and admirers of “The Dangerous Age”—and their name is legion—will find themselves perfectly at home in the following story. To them, Elsie Lindtner’s rambling aphorisms, her Bashkirtseffian revelations of soul, the remarkably frank letters which she delights to write to her friends, among whom she numbers her divorced husband; above all, her rather preposterous obsession with regard to the dangers of middle age, will be familiar as a twice-told tale.
Doubtless many will be charmed to meet Elsie Lindtner again, when she has passed through the dreaded furnace of her “forties,” and is still keeping the spark of inextinguishable youthfulness alive within her, by gambling at Monte Carlo, travelling in Greece with Jeanne of the flaming hair, fencing in London, riding in New York, and finally finding happiness and salvation in the adoption of a small offscouring of the streets.
But for those who may have missed reading the little masterpiece of modern femininity which only a short time ago set a whole continent by the ears, some sort of key is, possibly, necessary to the enjoyment of “Elsie Lindtner.”
In “The Dangerous Age” Elsie Lindtner writes an autobiographical letter to Joergen Malthe, the rising young architect, who has been her ardent admirer. She tells him now that her mother died when she was born, and her father was bankrupt, and lived disgraced in retirement, while she was left to the care of a servant girl.