which he is placed. In Winston Churchill's The Inside of the Cup" Alison Parr is shown in the midst of a garden which she has designed and which because of that fact reflects her own pagan propensities. Arnold Bennett in "The Price of Love" introduces Mrs. Maldon to us as she sits in a room she has herself furnished, and the description of the appointments of this room pictures, table, carpet, sofa, window-curtains, tapers, etc. is also a description (inferentially at least) of the woman who has selected and arranged them. Setting as the Cause of Events. The use of setting as a factor in shaping events is well illustrated in “The Marble Faun." Donatello, who is literally the product of his sylvan surroundings, meets Miriam in the grounds of the Villa Borghese. The ancient grove casts its spell upon him, and he in turn imparts "the influence of his elastic temperament" to Miriam. For a time they frisk and frolic like a veritable faun and dryad, and at last are impelled to lead that strange dance, which "seemed the realization of one of those basreliefs where a dance of nymphs, satyrs, or bacchanals is twined around the circle of an antique vase." During all this time, Hester stood, statue-like, at the foot of the scaffold. If the minister's voice had not kept her there, there would nevertheless have been an inevitable magnetism in that spot, whence she dated the first hour of her life of ignominy. There was a sense within her, too ill-defined to be made a thought, but weighing heavily on her mind, that her whole orb of life, both before and after, was connected with this spot, as with the one point that gave it unity. In like manner Hugo represents a sort of kinship as existing between the hunchback and Notre Dame. Thus, by little and little, his spirit expanded in harmony with the cathedral; there he lived, there he slept ; scarcely ever leaving it, and, being perpetually sub ject to its mysterious influence, he came at last to resemble it, to be incrusted with it, to form, as it were, an integral part of it. His salient angles dove-tailed, if we may be allowed the expression, into the receding angles of the building, so that he seemed to be not merely its inhabitant, but to have taken its form and pressure. Between the ancient church and him there were an instinctive sympathy so profound, so many magnetic affinities, that he stuck to it in some measure as the tortoise to its shell. The Sea-Mews in "The Toilers of the Sea." Gilliatt, leading his primitive existence on the barren reef, is strangely influenced by the sea-mews that share his bleak and desolate abode. Atmosphere. The perfect adaptation of characters and situations to setting and period imparts to the novel an enveloping or pervasive influence which is termed atmosphere." This influence is not a definite, tangible element of structure, but may perhaps be more accurately defined as a prevailing tone, which is the result of harmonious adjustment. The atmosphere of historic Rome permeates the pages of "The Marble Faun," and as early as the third paragraph of the novel Hawthorne not only confesses his desire to create that atmosphere, but explains the importance of setting as a factor in the process. We glance hastily at these things - at this bright sky, and those blue, distant mountains, and at the ruins, Etruscan, Roman, Christian, venerable with a threefold antiquity, and at the company of world-famous statues in the salon - in the hope of putting the reader into that state of feeling which is experienced oftenest at Rome. It is a vague sense of ponderous remembrances; a perception of such weight and density in a bygone life, of which this spot was the centre, that the present moment is pressed down or crowded out, and our individual affairs and interests are but half as real here as elsewhere. Viewed through this medium, our narrative into which are woven some airy and unsubstantial threads, intermixed with others, twisted out of the commonest stuff of human existence may seem not widely different from the texture of all our lives. 'Those are exceptions," he insisted. "The men of those times liked them young." We were about to say that the men of all times liked them young, but he hurried on : Salome and Esther and Delilah, if you must go back that far " "Cleopatra and the Queen of Sheba," we chanted, whereupon he settled down for an argument. "It must be admitted," he began, "that times have changed since the precocious Juliet carried on her well known affair with Romeo. Imagine a modern heroine doing anything at fourteen except terrorize her family with her ideas on intellectual freedom and the relations of the sexes "They don't do that until nineteen," we asserted firmly. "You're wrong on your dates. At fourteen they are still in boardingschool." He waived the reply aside. "The point is the same. At fourteen the modern heroine is, spiritually speaking, in her cradle. She does not realize she has a soul until at least twenty-nine "Twenty-nine does seem to be the magic date," we agreed, "Mrs. Humphry Ward's heroines all find themselves on their twentyninth birthday. Never a day before. But, comparing them to Juliet, you might say that the Southern climate "If you were going to remark that the Mediterranean climate hastens the development of heroines," he interrupted. "I must beg you to desist, for, while this may hold true of such classic examples as Juliet and Beatrice "And Carmen - we interposed. "There are still Desdemona and Beatrice D'Este and Catherine de Medici all the Medicis, in fact, who did not attain the complete use of their remarkable talents until well past thirty." 66 "That is history," we reminded him coldly, not literature." "Ah," he cried, "that merely proves my point. While the contemporaneous ladies of the day may have been, to put it mildly, middle-aged, the fact remains that the herɔines of their literature were all in their teens!" "And the moral of that is ?" "That the man of today," he exclaimed, warming to the subject, "wants woman as a companion, helpmate, friend. He no longer is tricked by a Dora or a doll baby. A mod "Which is that the Proserpines and Undines and Lorna Doones and Babbies, the Tesses and Hetty Sorrels and Juliets and Ophelias, are yielding to a new type the woman who has passed her thirtieth milestone and has lost the first bloom of youth. There are even occasions when she has a wrinkle in the delicate fabric of her cheek and the author does not always hesitate to draw a streak of gray in her raven hair." "If this is true," we demanded, what is to be done with our heroine? What shall she do for the next six years before she can emerge ready to cope with the demands of modern literature? Convents are no longer in existence and she is strong, beau "Oh, of course they all started young," he returned, everybody does that. But they don't really begin to live until they are past thirty. Look at Arnold Bennett's Alice Challice in Buried Alive'. tiful she was over forty; and the two Baines sisters in 'The Old Wives Tale' "Still," we remarked, "you haven't accounted for Helen of Troy." "There are many subjects that a mere man is unable to account for," he answered, with a sudden access of modesty, "and the incident of Helen of Troy is one of them. I have been informed, and have no reason to doubt, that the lady in question was fortyseven and had red hair at the time she launched the thousand ships and burned the topless towers of Ilium. But be that as it may, if you wish to inquire further into the private and social life of the ancient Greeks you will find that youth was a quality greatly sought after. Take Ulysses, for instance. His devotion to Penelope was said to be genuine, and yet we are informed that he left her for some ten years to weave shirts while he passed the time very pleasantly with the nymph Calypso. Not all of it, I admit ; there was Circe "She could hardly be called young," we interjected. 66 "then She might take up suffrage or run a car for the National League for Women's Service," he suggested brightly. "She is not athletic," we returned firmly, and, besides, she has been to college." "How about interior decorating?" he hazarded. "Every well regulated heroine takes a course in interior decorating and some of them even get a job. Or she might have a studio in Greenwich Village and cultivate Vers Libre. Teaching has gone out of fashion, and so, unfortunately, have the arts. Time was when a heroine could adopt a brilliant career as an opera singer or a portrait painter, but nowadays "She might marry a Tired Business Man," we hazarded, "and find out after a few years that marriage is a disappointment and that she must Lead Her Own Life." He shook his head sadly. "Even that is no longer the thing to do it has Gone Out. Ah! I have it! Desperate cases require desperate remedies. We'll offer a prize for the best suggestion." Beatrice Washburn. The New York Evening Post. THE WRITER is published the first of every 'month. It will be sent, postpaid, for $1.50 a year. The price of Canadian and foreign subscriptions is $1.62, including postage. .*. 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No one should accept a manuscript for sale without first reading it, and to read a manuscript takes time. Of course, if the manuscript is the work of a well known writer, a careful reading may not be necessary, but in the case of amateurs it is most essential to give minute attention to the manuscript. This means attention to such matters as spelling, punctuation, grammar, composition, construction, technique, plot work, etc. Surely one cannot do this without taking much time, and when I have gone over such manuscripts and have corrected the errors or pointed them out I feel that I have certainly earned the fee of a dollar, which is what I charge for critical reading of any manuscript under 5,000 words. I take the place of a teacher in these lines. Most of my work is among beginners, and I prefer it to be so, principally because writers who have sold material naturally have notions of their own, and when changes are suggested in a manuscript that is not sold, the author too often objects to making them. It is the business of the unbiased, disinterested critic to see the things that the author is too close to see, and often the critic is thus able to give the reason for the failure of a story to sell, which may be a very small thing, and yet large enough to prevent a sale. I contend that when a reader has given the time necessary to discover such a flaw, he is worthy of a fee for the work. My specialty is short stories. I have been able many times to suggest new incidents needed in otherwise good stories, and thus have made the manuscripts salable. I have a number of clients who send me their stories solely for criticism, with never a thought of getting them back to sell. In most cases, the work that I get of well |