It was the same Sunday. Mr. Squem sat in his room--extremely dennish, smitingly red as to walls, oppressive with plush upholstery. A huge deerhead, jutting from over the mantel, divided honors with a highly-colored September Morn, affrontingly framed. On a shelf stood a small bottle. It contained a finger of Mr. Squem, amputated years before, in alcohol. On the knees of the owner of the room was Volume One of the Universal History--Number 32, so red-ink figures affirmed, of a limited edition of five hundred sets. Mr. Squem's name was displayed, in very large Old English, on the fly-leaf, and above was an empty oval wherein his portrait might be placed. 'No use,' soliloquized the owner of this treasure, 'no use. If I _could_ chew it up and get it down,--or two of it,--_that_ wouldn't slide under the thing that isn't there. Nothing will ever put me in the class of Professor Browne or that preacher on the car, or bring the rest of me up to my clothes.' He rose and stretched. 'Maybe,' he said, addressing a huge chocolate-colored bust of an Indian lady, 'maybe I can catch up to those fellows some time--but not here. Noon, I bet,'--looking at his watch,--'and it is to eat.' He contemplated the Mantegna baby. 'So long,' he said, 'you're running things,' and snapped his watch. BIOGRAPHICAL AND INTERPRETATIVE NOTES THE PRELIMINARIES Cornelia A. P. Comer, accomplished critic, essayist, and writer of short stories, was educated at Vassar, and afterwards engaged in journalistic work in the Middle West and California. She now lives in Seattle. The plot of _The Preliminaries_ might readily be told in a single paragraph. Its significance lies in its lucid and austere psychology. The young Mr. Oliver Pickersgill appears in four distinct situations; and as we watch him in company with the four dominating and diverse personalities in turn, we are engrossed in the swift and poignant play of his feelings--feelings which finally deepen into a sincere and settled consciousness of attained truth and a confident loyalty to an imprisoned convict. The verisimilitude of both situation and conversation is complete; and in the process there is no exhaustion of emotional values. Henry James would not have treated the situations with more clarity. The author's further treatment of the problems connected with marriage is seen in two other noteworthy Atlantic stories--_The Kinzer Portraits and The Long Inheritance._ BUTTERCUP-NIGHT