. The
world was rotten to the core and the human race so filthy the wonder
was that any writer would handle it with tongs. But they plunged to
their necks. The public, whose urges, inhibitions, complexes, were in
a state of ferment, but inarticulate, found their release in these
novels and stories and wallowed in them. The more insulting, the more
ruthless, the more one-sided the disclosure of their irremediable
faults and meannesses, the more voluptuous the pleasure. There had
been reactions after the Civil War, but on a higher plane. The
population had not been maculated by inferior races.

The young editors, critics, special writers were enchanted. This was
Life! At last! Moreover, it was Democracy. These young and able men,
having renounced their earlier socialism, their sense of humor
recognizing its disharmony with high salaries and pleasant living, were
hot for Democracy. Nothing paid like Democracy in this heaving world.
The Democratic wave rose and roared. Symbolic was this violent
eruption of small-town fiction, as realistic as the kitchen, as
pessimistic as Wall Street. All virtue, all hope, all idealism, had
gone out of the world. Romance, for that matter, never had existed and
it was high time the stupid world was forcibly purged of its immemorial
illusion. Life was and ever had been sordid, commonplace, ignoble,
vulgar, immedicable; refinement was a cowardly veneer that was beneath
any seeker after Truth, and Truth was all that mattered. Love was to
laugh. Happiness was hysteria, and content the delusion of morons (a
word now hotly racing "authentic"). As for those verbal criminals,
"loyalty" and "patriotism"--_fecit vomitare_.

Their success was colossal.

Gora Dwight caught the crest of the wave and sold three hundred
thousand copies of "Fools." She immediately signed a contract with one
of the "woman's magazines" for the serial rights of her next novel for
thirty thousand dollars, and received a corresponding advance from her
publisher. Her short stories sold for two thousand dollars apiece, and
her first novel was exhumed and had a heavy sale.

It was difficult to be pessimistic with a hundred thousand dollars in
bonds and mortgages and the deed of a house in her strong box, but Gora
Dwight was an artist and could always fall back on technique. But
although her book was the intellectual expression of wildly distorted
complexes, owing to the disillusionments of war, the humiliat