called _Three Lives_ and had
thought it contained some of the best writing ever done by an American.
I was curious about this new book.

My brother had been at some sort of a gathering of literary people on
the evening before and someone had read aloud from Miss Stein's new
book. The party had been a success. After a few lines the reader stopped
and was greeted by loud shouts of laughter. It was generally agreed that
the author had done a thing we Americans call "putting something
across"--the meaning being that she had, by a strange freakish
performance, managed to attract attention to herself, get herself
discussed in the newspapers, become for a time a figure in our hurried,
harried lives.

My brother, as it turned out, had not been satisfied with the
explanation of Miss Stein's work then current in America, and so he
bought _Tender Buttons_ and brought it to me, and we sat for a time
reading the strange sentences. "It gives words an oddly new intimate
flavor and at the same time makes familiar words seem almost like
strangers, doesn't it," he said. What my brother did, you see, was to
set my mind going on the book, and then, leaving it on the table, he
went away.

And now, after these years, and having sat with Miss Stein by her own
fire in the rue de Fleurus in Paris I am asked to write something by way
of an introduction to a new book she is about to issue.

As there is in America an impression of Miss Stein's personality, not at
all true and rather foolishly romantic, I would like first of all to
brush that aside. I had myself heard stories of a long dark room with a
languid woman lying on a couch, smoking cigarettes, sipping absinthes
perhaps and looking out upon the world with tired, disdainful eyes. Now
and then she rolled her head slowly to one side and uttered a few words,
taken down by a secretary who approached the couch with trembling
eagerness to catch the falling pearls.

You will perhaps understand something of my own surprise and delight
when, after having been fed up on such tales and rather Tom Sawyerishly
hoping they might be true, I was taken to her to find instead of this
languid impossibility a woman of striking vigor, a subtle and powerful
mind, a discrimination in the arts such as I have found in no other
American born man or woman, and a charmingly brilliant conversationalist.

"Surprise and delight" did I say? Well, you see, my feeling is something
like this. Since Miss Stein's work