my
future was assured.

I mention these things because they were burnt into my mind at the time.
'Mrs. Falchion' was my first real novel, as I have said, though it had
been preceded by a short novel called 'The Chief Factor', since rescued
from publication and never published in book form in England. I realised
when I had written 'Mrs. Falchion' that I had not found my metier, and I
was fearful of complete failure. I had come but a few years before from
the South Seas; I was full of what I had seen and felt; I was eager to
write of it all, and I did write of it; but the thing which was deeper
still in me was the life which 'Pierre and His People', 'The Seats of
the Mighty', 'The Trail of the Sword', 'The Lane That Had no Turning',
and 'The Right of Way' portrayed. That life was destined to give me
an assured place and public, while 'Mrs. Falchion', and the South Sea
stories published in various journals before the time of its production,
and indeed anterior to the writing of the Pierre series, only assured me
attention.

Happily for the book, which has faults of construction, superficialities
as to incident, and with some crudity of plot, it was, in the main, a
study of character. There was focus, there was illumination in the book,
to what degree I will not try to say; and the attempt to fasten the
mind of the reader upon the central figure, and to present that central
figure in many aspects, safeguarded the narrative from the charge
of being a mere novel of adventure, or, as one writer called it, "an
impudent melodrama, which has its own fascinations."

Reading Mrs. Falchion again after all these years, I seem to realise
in it an attempt to combine the objective and subjective methods of
treatment--to combine analysis of character and motive with arresting
episode. It is a difficult thing to do, as I have found. It was not done
on my part wholly by design, but rather by instinct, and I imagine that
this tendency has run through all my works. It represents the elements
of romanticism and of realism in one, and that kind of representation
has its dangers, to say nothing of its difficulties. It sometimes
alienates the reader, who by instinct and preference is a realist, and
it troubles the reader who wants to read for a story alone, who cares
for what a character does, and not for what a character is or says,
except in so far as it emphasises what it does. One has to work,
however, in one's own way, after one's own id