he Friend of the Family. The Heroine is just a heroine; not a human.
There is not a subtle phrase or a disturbingly new thought, from start to
finish.

"There is a good mystery, too; along lines which have not been worked
over-often. And there is a glimpse of Untold Treasure. What better can you
ask; in a story that is frank melodrama?

"The scene, by the way, is laid in Northern California; a beautiful and
strikingly individualistic region which, for the most part, is ignored by
tourists for the man-made scenic effects and playgrounds of the southern
counties of the State.

"If, now and again, my puppets or my plot-wires creak a bit noisily,--what
then? Creaking, at worst, is a sure indication of movement,--of
action,--of incessant progress of sorts. A thing that creaks is not
standing still and gathering mildew. It moves. Otherwise it could not
creak.

"Yes, there are worse faults to a plot than an occasional tendency to
creakiness. It means, for one thing, that numberless skippable pages are
not consumed in photographic description of the ill-assorted furnishings
of the heroine's room or cosmos; nor in setting forth the myriad phases of
thought undergone by the hero in seeking to check the sway of his pet
complexes. (This drearily flippant slur on realism springs from pure envy.
I should rejoice to write such a book. But I can't. And, if I could, I
know I should never be able to stay awake long enough to correct its
proofs.)

"Yet, there is something to be said in behalf of the man or woman who
finds guilty joy in reading a story whose action gallops; a story whose
runaway pace breaks its stride only to leap a chasm or for a
breathcatching stumble on a precipice-edge. The office boy prefers Captain
Kidd to Strindberg; not because he is a boy, but because he is human and
has not yet learned the trick of disingenuousness. He is still normal. So
is the average grown-up.

"These normal and excitement-loving readers are overwhelmingly in the
majority. Witness the fact that _The Bat_ had a longer run in New York
than have all of Dunsany's and Yeats's rare dramas, put together. If we
insist that our country be guided by majority-rule, then why sneer at a
majority-report in literary tastes?

"_Ben Hur_ was branded as a 'religious dime novel.' Yet it has had fifty
times the general vogue of Anatole France's pseudo-blasphemy which deals
with the same period. Public taste is not always, necessarily, bad taste.
'The com