For external nature she cares little. Her backgrounds are meager; the human element alone interests her. There is no Mary E. Wilkins country as there is a Sarah Orne Jewett country; there are only Mary E. Wilkins people. A somber group they are--exceptions, perhaps, grim survivals, distortions, yet absolutely true to one narrow phase of New England life. Her realism as she depicts these people is as inexorable as Balzac's. "A Village Lear" would have satisfied even Maupassant. Not one jot is bated from the full horror of the picture; it is driven to its pitiless end without a moment of softening. No detail is omitted. It is _Père Goriot_ reduced to a chapter. A picture like this from "Louisa" grips one by its very pitilessness: There was nothing for supper but some bread and butter and weak tea, though the old man had his dish of Indian-meal porridge. He could not eat much solid food. The porridge was covered with milk and molasses. He bent low over it, and ate large spoonfuls with loud noises. His daughter had tied a towel around his neck as she would have tied a pinafore on a child. She had also spread a towel over the tablecloth in front of him, and she watched him sharply lest he should spill his food. "I wish I could have somethin' to eat that I could relish the way he does that porridge and molasses," said she [the mother]. She had scarcely tasted anything. She sipped her weak tea laboriously. Louisa looked across at her mother's meager little figure in its neat old dress, at her poor small head bending over the teacup, showing the wide parting in the thin hair. "Why don't you toast your bread, mother?" said she. "I'll toast it for you." "No, I don't want it. I'd jest as soon have it this way as any. I don't want no bread, nohow. I want somethin' to relish--a herrin', or a little mite of cold meat, or somethin'. I s'pose I could eat as well as anybody if I had as much as some folks have. Mis' Mitchell was sayin' the other day that she didn't believe but what they had butcher's meat up to Mis' Nye's every day in the week. She said Jonathan he went to Wolfsborough and brought home great pieces in a market-basket every week." She is strong only in short efforts. She has small power of construction: even _Pembroke_ may be resolved into a series of short stories. The setness of Barnabas Thayer is prolonged until it ceases to be convincing: we lose sympathy; he becomes a mere Ben Jonson "humor" and not a human being. The story is strong only in its episodes--the cherry party of the tight-fisted Silas Berry, the midnight coasting of the boy Ephraim, the removal of Hannah to the poorhouse, the marriage of Rebecca--but these touch the very heart of New England. Because of their artlessness they are the perfection of art.