nowadays than of old, formerly confessed to having
only one set rule when it came to investment in new
reading-matter--always to buy the Williamsons' last book. Her reason
was the perfectly sensible one that the Williamsons' plots used
invariably to pivot upon motor-trips, and she is an ardent
automobilist. Since, as of late, the Williamsons have seen fit to
exercise their typewriter upon other topics, they have as a matter of
course lost her patronage.

This principle of selection, when you come to appraise it sanely, is
the sole intelligent method of dealing with reading-matter. It seems
here expedient again to state the peculiar problem that we
average-novel-readers have of necessity set the modern
novelist--namely, that his books must in the main appeal to people who
read for pastime, to people who read books only under protest and only
when they have no other employment for that particular half-hour.

Now, reading for pastime is immensely simplified when the book's theme
is some familiar matter of the reader's workaday life, because at
outset the reader is spared considerable mental effort. The motorist
above referred to, and indeed any average-novel-reader, can without
exertion conceive of the Williamsons' people in their automobiles.
Contrariwise, were these fictitious characters embarked in palankeens
or droshkies or jinrikishas, more or less intellectual exercise would
be necessitated on the reader's part to form a notion of the
conveyance. And we average-novel-readers do not open a book with the
intention of making a mental effort. The author has no right to expect
of us an act so unhabitual, we very poignantly feel. Our prejudices he
is freely chartered to stir up--if, lucky rogue, he can!--but he ought
with deliberation to recognize that it is precisely in order to avoid
mental effort that we purchase, or borrow, his book, and afterward
discuss it.

Hence arises our heartfelt gratitude toward such novels as deal with
"vital" themes, with the questions we average-novel-readers confront or
make talk about in those happier hours of our existence wherein we are
not reduced to reading. Thus, a tale, for example, dealing either with
"feminism" or "white slavery" as the handiest makeshift of
spinsterdom--or with the divorce habit and plutocratic iniquity in
general, or with the probable benefits of converting clergymen to
Christianity, or with how much more than she knows a desirable mother
will tell h