celluloid comb"? From this point of view could she hear "the sound of two automobiles coming together" with the brakes of the street car screeching "simultaneously"?

In the use of words, too, the author seems a little careless at times. The automobiles came together "with complete abandon," yet we are told in the final paragraph that the result was nothing worse than "bent fenders." And apparently the drivers were not at all shaken up, nor was their hair mussed. Again in the matter of diction, does not the writer make "Blue-Coveralls" a little too "dynamic" with his leaping, dashing, jerking, slamming, and furious pushing?

Might not the anecdote be improved by the omission of the final paragraph, especially since the writer gives us really unnecessary information and confuses us by using two physical points of view at once? Though the street car bears her onward, she is apparently still with the two drivers, for she tells us that they amicably settled their differences. Let us consider a second specimen.

MY BUSY HOSTESS

A hostess, who had on her living room table, the week before Christmas, artificial cherry blossoms in a Japanese bowl, when her own woods abounded in holly, mistletoe and long leaf pine, and her own people made wonderful pottery.

A large woman, with shining black eyes, and hair too black to be true, my hostess has the voice of an auctioneer. She has "taken" elocution in her school days and never quite lived it down.

"Do look at the sycamores! To me they seem ghostly, their white arms stretching out among the other trees as if to grasp them in a weird embrace!" With just a trace of expressive gesture she passed into higher thought. "And do you read Schnitzler? And to me French! Ah, Mrs. Campbell, French! But a mother's time is so taken up with her little ones, that she cannot lead her own life - but my French-how I adore it I have to neglect it, but it is one of my soul's passions. And my music! Nothing will ever make me forget that! It is the breath of life to me. But here"-With a wide sweep of her arms, she included her corner of the world. "Well, one must live where life places one. yes," and my hostess looked meditatively out over the exquisite fluffy puffiness of a perfect

Yes,

pine, whose pompon top was just level with the window of my bedroom, where we sat. There were the cotton fields where the unpicked cotton was like a light snow, and the dark woods away beyond made the horizon a wavy line of almost-black-green, behind which the sunset sky was streaked with pale gold. In the midst of this beauty she continued sadly, "Yes, where life places onebut I, I long for contact, contact with people, minds, Mrs. Campbell, minds. Here one feels buried. Of course there are the activities of the city very near, and the University, but as I say, a mother's life is not her own. One lives these other little lives, always here in the home, where is, of course, a mother's place."

She seemed to shake off the little lives with an effort and, rising briskly, continued with just the slightest pause, “Well, let's be getting dressed. I told Mrs. White we'd pick her up at six-thirty the dinner's at seven. Dear me, bridge afterward will keep us so late! And I promised Fannie we'd be at the Country Club by eleven in the morning. I always go to their Saturday bridge luncheons, - they are marvelous, simply marvelous, my dear. After lunch I told Henrietta we'd come on over to town to see that hat she's had laid asideI'm afraid it's purple-I can't get her off purple hats. Shopping does wear one out, doesn't it? And then we'd have time-just a moment we can snatch, to have tea at the Woman's Club - they've just done over the sun-room in orange and emerald- with stuffed parrots! Ravishing, my dear, positively ravishing!"

Desperately I protested that I was accustomed to an afternoon nap, and this leading lady akimboed her muscular arms and demanded of cringing me, "You say you have to rest? Why, my dear, you are resting. This place is buried, I tell you, in this wonderful grove. How the wind does lull one to sleep, as it sings in the branches! We'll come right back out here. But I have to stop by the store and get some of that new shade of rouge, 'Cerise' is the name, the French word for brick-dust- you know ceramics means something you burn in a kiln, -- it's the same rootstem I do love derivations, don't you? I must brush up on my French-I think there is a word for cherry that's like that one. The new rouge is so good with dyed squirrel. Then we will have a rest before dinner - the men stay so long at the Golf Club. Yes, I asked Helen to bring Bill. I loathe him, he is so pompous, but they entertain a great deal, and one must stand in to get out, sounds like a pun or an epigram or something, doesn't it? What's the French? Oh, yes! bo mo!"

From down stairs came a piercing note, "Mother, where's my gogphy book?"

"Look, mother's lamb, under the library table; Benny had it to draw on," answered my hostess, turning to me, and spreading her palms up helplessly. "The children's lessons!

The sketch shows that the author knows what she wants to do, and to a considerable extent she has succeeded. The hostess is rather vividly presented as a person who actually exists. The sketch is, as a whole, a clear, and doubtless truthful picture. Its chief fault is irregularity of composition. It begins with a long group of words that is not a sentence. Would not a sentence be more effective? Several sentences in the sketch are somewhat incoherent. Incoherence in the sentences quoted from the busy hostess we expect, and they help to characterize her; but incoherence in the writer's own sentences constitute a fault of composition. Perhaps the author wrote hastily, and has submitted an only slightly revised second draft of her sketch. Close revision and careful polishing would undoubtedly increase the effectiveness of what she has written.

Louis Bromfield, in an article for the New York Sun, comments upon the pleasures and agonies of a novelist when writing a play. He says: "It is more fun and more agony than I ever encountered, and I insist that the agony of a straight playwright is as nothing compared to the suffering of a novelist forced by his own conscience to commit mayhem upon the plot and characters of a book which is perhaps his favorite novel. . . .

"The novelist-playwright is fully aware of all the hurdles he must cross before arriving at the starting place of the ordinary worker in the theatre. The most difficult hurdle of all is the one which exists in the minds of the public which is familiar with the book

all the voices which say, 'Oh, but Lily or Irene or Julia or Whoosis was not like that in the book, or the book did n't end that way,' and so on. . . If the play turns out to be a complete flop it is n't going to stop one novelist from continuing to write for the theatre. He's tasted blood. He's sat in at rehearsals and gone on the road and sat incognito in the midst of audiences outside New York. It's too late now to save him, because writing a play and seeing it come into existence is about ten times as much fun and ten times as much agony as writing novels. But it is doubtful whether he'll ever again take on the added suffering of committing mayhem on one of his own books."

T isn't often that one's first article gets

IT

accepted by two publishers simultaneously but such was the result of Ernest Poole's first venture into the literary world.

"Roy Scott at the University Settlement helped me to shape my first article," Mr. Poole told me when I interviewed him recently at the attractive little Coffee House Club in New York City. "I took this first sketch of mine to the old Century," he said. "They promised to publish it but not as soon as I wanted them to, so then I left it at McClure's for them to look over. A few days later, I went to Chicago for Christmas and there I received a telegram from McClure's, saying that they would take it, and at the same time, I had another wire from the Century, stating that they had reconsidered and would publish my article immediately, so you see I had it accepted by both of them."

At this time, Mr. Poole was living at the University Settlement on the lower East Side of New York just after graduating from Princeton in 1902. From then on, McClure's, Collier's, and other periodicals accepted his articles, which sketched tenement life in New York and dealt with labor conditions in Chicago where he was born.

The Princetonian says of Mr. Poole's career: "To read of it is to acquire the feeling of wanderlust which is more or less dormant in every man. His books are real because the writer has seen the things which he is describing."

"When I lived in Chicago, music interested me much more than writing," Mr. Poole told me. "In fact," he said, "I quit school and spent a year just studying music. That is one reason I write more by sound than by sight. I think probably most fiction writers

write by sight-they don't hear the voices of their characters as I do. I remember most people by their voices."

Because of his various foreign experiences which reveal themselves in his fiction, it is interesting to follow the course of his travels. Towards the end of the Russo-Japanese War, he went to Russia as correspondent of the Outlook and later wrote articles and stories from all parts of Europe.

During the next few years three of his plays were produced: "None So Blind," "A Man's Friends," and "Take Your Medicine." This last play was written in collaboration with Harriet Ford.

"Nothing is as exciting as writing for the theatre," Mr. Poole asserted, "but my bent seems to be writing novels."

Mr. Poole's first novel, "The Harbor," met with instantaneous success. In this book, his masterful description of the strike of the dock-men is one of those passages which linger forever in one's memory. This book became so popular that it was published in England, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Holland, and Hungary.

"In the autumn of 1914, I went to Berlin as a correspondent," continued Mr. Poole, "and from there to the Eastern Front and later down into France with the Bavarian Army-writing articles for the Saturday Evening Post and other magazines. I used to write in the dugouts all the time during the war. Any place suits me for writing, it doesn't matter where," said Mr. Poole with a faintly reminiscent smile.

"Just how do you write a story?" I queried, as I was curious to know how he moulded his novels.

"What I do with a story is to outline it," he explained, "I let it soak in my mind for a while, in the back of my brain as it were, and then I take it out every so often and I find other thoughts come flocking to it as to a magnet. You get ideas if you wait long enough for them. I wait till I have a pretty good sense of the proportions of my story and then I write sections of it roughly in a sort of

shorthand that I know. From these, I write the first draft and have that typed. Afterwards, I rewrite it once or twice."

"For instance, with my new novel, 'Silent Storms,' I began with short outlines. I did forty or fifty pages as I traveled around Europe. I remember I wrote four or five pages of that book in the gardens of the League of Nations; I know I was in Chapter XXVII trying to manage the heroine at that time.

"Later, I went up to the White Mountains and worked over this book, skiing and writing alternately. During eight or ten months I rewrote the book two or three times. As Ibsen used to say, 'Characters are bound to get more and more real,' and I found this was true. Though I have never used a whole real character, I have used parts of real characters. The girl in 'Silent Storms,' for example, is a composite of two different girls, both born in France of Russian mothers."

"Silent Storms" is now in its fifth printing. It was first printed in England, two weeks ahead of its first appearance in this country. In explaining the impulse which prompted him to write this book, Mr, Poole said:

"A good many people are coming to hate. the Americans, the French particularly. The feeling against us is growing. We have so much money it is probably natural. When I was last in France I felt this antipathy very keenly. That is why I tried to write this story about a Wall street banker and a fascinating daughter of France."

It is a stirring tale of an international marriage, a story dealing with the conflict of the new America and the new Europe, but the love interest is always present. His theme is sometimes the streets, sometimes the home, sometimes the office, sometimes New York life, and sometimes life in the French capital. The story carries one along with breathless suspense until the outcome of the marriage becomes of vital importance to the reader.

Aside from this book Mr. Poole has written "His Second Wife," "The Village," "The Dark People," "Blind," "Beggar's Gold,"