ough she was already known as a writer (chiefly for the theatre) under
her own name.

I do not know that Miss Graves has ever said anything publicly about her
motive in electing the name of Richard Dehan. But I feel that whatever the
cause the result was the distinct emergence of a totally different
personality. There is no final disassociation between Clotilde Graves and
Richard Dehan. Richard Dehan, novelist, steadily employs the material
furnished in valuable abundance by Clotilde Graves's life. At the same
time the personality of Richard Dehan is so unusual, so gifted, so lavish
in its invention and so much at home in surprising backgrounds, that
something approaching a psychic explanation of authorship seems called
for.

=ii=

Clotilde Inez Mary Graves was born at Barracks, Buttevant, County Cork,
Ireland, on June 3, 1864, third daughter of the late Major W. H. Graves of
the Eighteenth Royal Irish Regiment and Antoinette, daughter of Captain
George Anthony Deane of Harwich. Thus, the English _Who's Who_.

"She numbers among her ancestors admirals and deans," said The Bookman in
1912.

As the same magazine at about the same time spoke of her as descended from
Charles II.'s naval architect, Admiral Sir Anthony Deane, one wonders if
Sir Anthony were not the sum of the admirals and the total of the deans.
But no; at any rate in so far as the admirals are concerned, for Miss
Graves is also said to be distantly related to Admiral Nelson.

I will give you what The Bookman said in the "Chronicle and Comment"
columns of its number for February, 1913:

"Richard Dehan was nine years old when her family emigrated to England
from their Irish home. She had seen a good deal of barrack life, and at
Southsea, where they went to live, she acquired a large knowledge of both
services in the circle of naval and military friends they made there, and
this knowledge years afterward she turned to account in _Between Two
Thieves_. In 1884, Miss Graves became an art student and worked at the
British Museum galleries and the Royal Female School of Art, helping to
support herself by journalism of a lesser kind, among other things drawing
little pen-and-ink grotesques for the comic papers. By and by she resolved
to take to dramatic writing and being too poor, she says, to manage in any
other way, she abandoned art and took an engagement in a travelling
theatrical company. In 1888 her first chance as a dramatist came. She was
again in Lo