t I don't go so far as
to feel grieved and annoyed by the preference some people give to my
"Lord Jim." I won't even say that I "fail to understand...." No! But
once I had occasion to be puzzled and surprised.

A friend of mine returning from Italy had talked with a lady there who
did not like the book. I regretted that, of course, but what surprised
me was the ground of her dislike. "You know," she said, "it is all so
morbid."

The pronouncement gave me food for an hour's anxious thought. Finally I
arrived at the conclusion that, making due allowances for the subject
itself being rather foreign to women's normal sensibilities, the lady
could not have been an Italian. I wonder whether she was European at
all? In any case, no Latin temperament would have perceived anything
morbid in the acute consciousness of lost honour. Such a consciousness
may be wrong, or it may be right, or it may be condemned as artificial;
and, perhaps, my Jim is not a type of wide commonness. But I can safely
assure my readers that he is not the product of coldly perverted
thinking. He's not a figure of Northern Mists either. One sunny morning
in the commonplace surroundings of an Eastern roadstead, I saw his form
pass by--appealing--significant--under a cloud--perfectly silent. Which
is as it should be. It was for me, with all the sympathy of which I was
capable, to seek fit words for his meaning. He was "one of us."

J. C.

June, 1917.

YOUTH

The three stories in this volume lay no claim to unity of artistic
purpose. The only bond between them is that of the time in which they
were written. They belong to the period immediately following the
publication of "The Nigger of the _Narcissus_," and preceding the first
conception of "Nostromo," two books which, it seems to me, stand apart
and by themselves in the body of my work. It is also the period during
which I contributed to _Maga_; a period dominated by "Lord Jim" and
associated in my grateful memory with the late Mr. William Blackwood's
encouraging and helpful kindness.

"Youth" was not my first contribution to _Maga_. It was the second. But
that story marks the first appearance in the world of the man Marlow,
with whom my relations have grown very intimate in the course of years.
The origins of that gentleman (nobody as far as I know had ever hinted
that he was anything but that)--his origins have been the subject of
some literary speculation of, I am glad to say, a frie