s of the fashionable people led by young Mrs. Mortimer Dwight;
but had fallen flat in the East in spite of the reviews. Then had come
a long intermission when fictionists were of small account in a world
of awful facts. She was quite forgotten, for she made not even a
casual contribution to the magazines; shortly after the war broke out
she offered her services to England and for long and weary years was
one of the most valued nurses in the British armies. At the close of
the war she had returned to California, intending to write her new
novel at Lake Tahoe, but finding the season in full swing she had gone
to some small interior town and written it there. When it was finished
she had brought it on to New York and had remained here ever since.

So ended the brief biography, which was elaborated in many articles and
interviews.

As for the novel, it won her instant fame and a small fortune. It was
gloomy, pessimistic, excoriating, merciless, drab, sordid, and
hideously realistic. Its people hailed from that plebeian end of the
vegetable garden devoted to turnips and cabbages. They possessed all
the mean vices and weaknesses that detestable humanity has so far
begotten. They were all failures and their pitiful aspirations were
treated with biting irony. Futile, futile world!

The scene was laid in a small town in California, a microcosm of the
stupidities of civilization and of the United States of America in
particular. The celebrated "atmosphere" of the state was ignored. The
town and the types were "American"; it would seem that merely some
unadmitted tenuous sentiment had set the scene in the state of the
author's birth, but there the concession ended. Even the climate was
treated with the scorn that all old _cliches_ deserved. (Her
biographers might have contributed the information that the climate of
a California interior town in summer is simply infernal.)

Naturally, the book created a furore. A few years before it would have
expired at birth, even had a publisher been mad enough to offer it to a
smug contented world. But the daily catalogue of the horrors and the
obscenities of war, the violent dislocations that followed with their
menaces of panic and revolution that affected the nerves and the
pockets of the entire commonwealth, the irritable reaction against the
war itself, knocked romance, optimism, aspiration, idealism, the sane
and balanced judgment of life, to smithereens. More _cliches_