When you sit at luncheon at the large round table in the men's café you may find yourself between a famous polo-player from Meadowbrook, and a bronzed young ranch-owner, who will tell you that cattle rustling still goes on in his section of the country. The latter you will take for a perfect product of the West, a "gentleman cowboy," from a novel. But presently you will learn that he is a member of that almost equally fictitious thing, an "old New York family," that he has been in the West but a year or two, and that he was in "Tark's class" at Princeton. So on around the table. One man has just arrived from Paris; another from Honolulu, or the Philippines, or China or Japan. And when, as we were sitting there, a man came in whom I had met in Rome ten years before, I said to myself: This is not life. It is the beginning of a short story by some disciple of Mrs. Wharton: A group of cosmopolitans seated around a table in a club. Casual mention of Bombay, Buda-Pesth and Singapore. Presently some man will flick his cigarette ash and say, "By the way, De Courcey, what ever became of the queer little chap we used to see at the officer's mess in Simla?" Whereupon De Courcey, late of the Lancers, and second son of Lord Thusandso, will light a fresh Corona and recount, according to the accepted formula, the story of The Queer Little Chap. I could even imagine the illustrations for the story. They would be by Wenzell, and would show us there, in the club, like a group of sleek Greek statues, clothed in full afternoon regalia of the most unbelievable smoothness--looking, in short, not at all like ourselves, or anybody else. However, the story of The Queer Little Chap was not told. That is the trouble with trying to live short stories. You can get them started, sometimes, but they never work out. If the setting is all right, the story somehow will not "break," whereas, on the other hand, when the surroundings are absolutely wrong, when the wrong people are present, when the conditions are utterly impossible, your short story will break violently and without warning, and will very likely cover you with spots. The trouble is that life, in its more fragmentary departments, lacks what we call "form" and "composition." There is something amateurish about it. Nine editors out of ten would reject a short story written by the Hand of Fate, on this ground, and would probably advise Fate to go and take a course in short-story-writing at some university. No; Fate has not the short story gift. She writes novels--rather long and rambling, most of them, like those of De Morgan or Romaine Rolland. But even her novels are not popular. People say they are too long. They can't be bothered reading novels which consume a whole lifetime. Besides, Fate seldom supplies a happy ending, and that's what people want, now-a-days. So, though Fate's novels are given away, they have no vogue.