If you want to read a story that is all wheat and no chaff, read "Blix." Last winter that brilliant young Californian, Mr. Norris, published a remarkable and gloomy novel, "McTeague," a book deep in insight, rich in promise and splendid in execution, but entirely without charm and as disagreeable as only a great piece of work can be. And now this gentleman, who is not yet thirty, turns around and gives us an idyll that sings through one's brain like a summer wind and makes one feel young enough to commit all manner of indiscretions. It may be that Mr. Norris is desirous of showing us his versatility and that he can follow any suit, or it may have been a process of reaction. I believe it was after M. Zola had completed one of his greatest and darkest novels of Parisian life that he went down to the seaside and wrote "La Reve," a book that every girl should read when she is eighteen, and then again when she is eighty. Powerful and solidly built as "McTeague" is, one felt that there method was carried almost too far, that Mr. Norris was too consciously influenced by his French masters. But "Blix" belongs to no school whatever, and there is not a shadow of pedantry or pride of craft in it from cover to cover. "Blix" herself is the method, the motives and the aim of the book. The story is an exhalation of youth and spring; it is the work of a man who breaks loose and forgets himself. Mr. Norris was married only last summer, and the march from "Lohengrin" is simply sticking out all over "Blix." It is the story of a San Francisco newspaper man and a girl. The newspaper man "came out" in fiction, so to speak, in the drawing room of Mr. Richard Harding Davis, and has languished under that gentleman's chaperonage until he has come to be regarded as a fellow careful of nothing but his toilet and his dinner. Mr. Davis' reporters all bathed regularly and all ate nice things, but beyond that their tastes were rather colorless. I am glad to see one red-blooded newspaper man, in the person of "Landy Rivers," of San Francisco, break into fiction; a real live reporter with no sentimental loyalty for his "paper," and no Byronic poses about his vices, and no astonishing taste about his clothes, and no money whatever, which is the natural and normal condition of all reporters. "Blix" herself was just a society girl, and "Landy" took her to theatres and parties and tried to make himself believe he was in love with her. But it wouldn't work, for "Landy" couldn't love a society girl, not though she were as beautiful as the morning and terrible as an army with banners, and had "round full arms," and "the skin of her face was white and clean, except where it flushed into a most charming pink upon her smooth, cool cheeks." For while "Landy Rivers" was at college he had been seized with the penchant for writing short stories, and had worshiped at the shrines of Maupassant and Kipling, and when a man is craft mad enough to worship Maupassant truly and