that she who made
you will be encouraged by your charm to deal bravely with her imagination
and to give the world other romances quite her own and without the alloy
of his coarser wit_.

_Philip_.

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CONTENTS

PAGE

PART I--Which shows how Jessica
visits an editor in the city, and
what comes of it 1

PART II--Which shows how the editor
visits Jessica in the country, and
how love and philosophy
sometimes clash 83

PART III--Which shows how the editor
again visits Jessica in the country, and
how love is buffeted between
philosophy and religion 212

------------------------------------------------------------------------

The First Part

which shows how Jessica visits an editor
in the city, and what comes of it.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

I

PHILIP TO JESSICA

NEW YORK, April 20, 19--.

MY DEAR MISS DOANE:

You will permit me to address you with this semblance of familiarity, I
trust, for the frankness of our conversation in my office gives me some
right to claim you as an acquaintance. And first of all let me tell you
that we shall be glad to print your review of _The Kentons_, and shall be
pleased to send you a long succession of novels for analysis if you can
always use the scalpel with such atrocious cunning as in this case. I say
atrocious cunning, for really you have treated Mr. Howells with a touch of
that genial "process of vivisection" to which it pleases him to subject
the lively creatures of his own brain.

"Mr. Howells," you say, "is singularly gifted in taking to pieces the
spiritual machinery of unimpeachable ladies and gentlemen"; and really you
have made of the author one of the good people of his own book! That is a
malicious revenge for his "tedious accuracy," is it not? And you dare to
speak of his "hypnotic power of illusion which is so essentially a freak
element in his mode of expression that even in portraying the tubby,
good-natured, elderly gentleman in this story he refines upon his vitals
and sensibilities until the wretched victim becomes a sort of cataleptic."
Now that is a "human unfairness" from a critic whom the mos