you don’t know how glad I am to see you. There was no friend with a white cravat standing on the first page to introduce us, and tell us that the authoress bore in her book a fecund message to struggling humanity, and that the major part of that same humanity could not see it; hence it was his duty to stand at the portal and solve the riddle. There was no begging for recognition on the score of ancestors, fads or isms. I am Agnes Repplier, said the book; how do you like me? A few pages perused, and my own voice amusingly fell on my ears, saying first class. Here was a woman who thought—not the trivial thought that nauseates in the books of so many literary women—but virile aggressive thought, that provokes, contradicts, and, like Hamlet’s ghost, will not be downed. This thought is folded in a garment, whose many hues quicken the curiosity and make her pages a continual feast of wit, droll irony, and illuminative criticism all curiously and harmoniously blended. Her pages are rich in suggestion, apt in quotation. You are constantly aroused, put on your guard, laughingly disarmed, and that in a way that Lamb would have loved. She has no awe in the presence of literary gods. Lightly she trips up to them with her poniard, shows by a pass that they are made of mud, and that the aureole that encircles them is but the work of your crude imagination. Clearing away your shreds and patches she puts the author in a plain suit before you, and, how you wonder, that with all your boasted knowledge you have called for years a jackdaw a peacock!