stic
Three--Fate, Chance, and Destiny--and how it frequently happened that a
young man "tripped over the maliciously extended foot of Fate and fell
plump into the open arms of Destiny." Perhaps it was due to one of the
pranks of the mystic sisters that Mr. Chambers himself should lay down
his brush and palette and take up the pen. Mr. Chambers studied art in
Paris for seven years. At twenty-four his paintings were accepted at the
Salon; at twenty-eight he had returned to New York and was busy as an
illustrator for _Life, Truth_, and other periodicals. But already the
desire to write was coursing through him. The Latin Quarter of Paris,
where he had studied so long, seemed to haunt him; he wanted to tell its
story. So he did write the story and, in 1893, published it under the
title of "In the Quarter." The same year he published another book, "The
King in Yellow," a grewsome tale, but remarkably successful. The easel
was pushed aside; the painter had become writer.

Writing of Mr. Chambers's novel of last fall

THE DANGER MARK

in _The Bookman_, Dr. Frederic Taber Cooper said, "In this last field
(the society novel) it would seem as though Mr. Chambers had, at length,
found himself; and the fact that the last of the four books is the best
and most sustained and most honest piece of work he has yet done affords
solid ground for the belief that he has still better and maturer volumes
yet to come. There is no valid reason why Mr. Chambers should not
ultimately be remembered as the novelist who left behind him a
comprehensive human comedy of New York."

This is another novel of society life like "The Fighting Chance" and "The
Firing Line." The chief characters in the story are a boy and a girl,
inheritors of a vast fortune, whose parents are dead, and who have been
left in the guardianship of a large Trust Company. They are brought up
with no companions of their own age and are a unique pair when turned
out, on coming of age, into New York society--two children educated by a
great machine, possessors of fabulous wealth, with every inherited
instinct for good and evil set free for the first time. The fact that the
girl has acquired the habit of dropping a little cologne on a lump of
sugar and nibbling it when tired or depressed gives an indication of the
struggle that the children have before them, a struggle of their own, in
the midst of their luxurious surroundings, more vital, more real,
perhaps, than any that Mr. Cha