low thrilling voice weigh down her
meaningless murmurs with significance. To many of her victims the very
incompleteness of her sentences was a form of divine loyalty. One young
poet had described her soul as a fluttering, desperate bird beating its
wings on the bars of her marvellous loveliness. At this her lazy smile
looked very wise. She thought my father an ideal husband. He was always
right about her clothes and after all he was the greatest living expert on
her beauty. Obviously he loved her but--well, he didn't love her
inconveniently."

=vii=

There will be some who remember reading a first novel, published several
years ago, called _Responsibility_. This was a study from a Samuel
Butleresque standpoint of the attitude of a father toward an illegitimate
son. At least, that is what it came to in the end; but there were
leisurely earlier pages dealing with such subjects as the tiresomeness of
Honest Work and the dishonesty of righteous people. Very good they were,
too. James E. Agate was the author of this decidedly interesting piece of
fiction. He was not a particularly young man, being in his early forties;
but he was a youngish man. He was youngish in the sense that Mr. Wells and
Mr. Bennett are youngish, and not in the sense of Sir James Peter Pan
Barrie--incapable of growing up. As dramatic critic for the Saturday
Review, London, Agate has been much happier than in a former experience on
the Cotton Exchange of Manchester, his native city. "Each week," said The
Londoner in The Bookman, recently, "he watches over the theatre with an
enthusiasm for the drama which must constantly be receiving disagreeable
shocks. He is a man full of schemes, so that the title of his new book is
distinctly appropriate." That new book is called _Alarums and
Excursions_.

"Agate is not peaceable," continues our informant. "He carries his full
energy, which is astounding, into each topic that arises. He seizes it.
Woe betide the man who dismisses an idol of his. It is not to be done. He
will submit to no man, however great that man's prestige may be. He is the
bulldog."

Agate is a critic "still vigorous enough and fresh enough to attack and to
destroy shams of every kind. This is what Agate does in _Alarums and
Excursions_."

Bright news is it that Agate is writing a new novel "on the Balzacian
scale of _Responsibility_."

=viii=

It was in 1918, when I was exploring new books for a New York book
section, that there came