ion of her
ego in woman's most disastrous adventure, and the consequent repression
of all her dearest urges, she deserved her success far more than any of
her adolescent rivals. She had formed her style in the days of
complete normalcy, and not only was that style distinguished, vigorous,
and individual, but she was able to convey her extremest realism so
subtly and yet so unambiguously that she could afford to disdain the
latrinities of the "younger school." A marvellous feat. Most of them
used the frank vocabulary of the humble home, as alone synonymous with
Truth. Never before had such words invaded the sacrosanct pages of
American letters. Little they recked, as Mr. Lee Clavering, who took
the entire school as an obscene joke, pointed out, that they were but
taking the shortest cut--advantage of the post-war license affecting
all classes--to save themselves the exhausting effort of acquiring a
vocabulary and forming a style.

The spade as a symbol vanished from fiction.

Miss Dwight had her own ideals, little as she permitted her unfortunate
characters to have any, and not only was she a consummate master of
words and of the art of suggestion, but she had been brought up by
finicky parents who held that certain words were not to be used in
refined society. The impressions received in plastic years were not to
be obliterated by any fad of the hour.

No one knew, not even her fellow Californians, that she had had a
disastrous love affair which had culminated in an attempt to murder her
beautiful sister-in-law. Her book had been a wild revulsion from every
standard of her youth, and she loathed love and the bare idea of mutual
happiness in fellow mortals as she recently had loathed blood and filth
and war and Germans.

Success is a great healer. Moreover, she was a woman of strong and
indomitable character, and very proud. She consigned the man, who,
after all, was the author of her phenomenal success, to nethermost
oblivion. You cannot sell three hundred thousand copies of a book,
receive hundreds of letters from unknown admirers telling you that you
are the greatest novelist living, see your name constantly in the
"news," be besieged by editors and publishers, and become a popular
favorite with Sophisticates, and carry around a lacerated heart. The
past fades. The present reigns. The future is rosy as the dawn. Gora
Dwight was far too arrogant at this period of her career to love any
man even had t