It explains to me the Hergesheimer women, too, those troublingly ornamental odalisques. They are fine costly toys, tricked out in curious tissues: and, waiting for the strong male’s leisure, they smile cryptically. They will divert him by and by, when the day’s work is dispatched, maintaining their own thoughts inviolate, even in the instant of comminglement wherein the strongest man abates reserve: but their moment is not daylit, for the Hergesheimer women are all-incongruous with what is done during office hours, nor are they to be valued then. Sometimes they are embodied ideals, to be sure, remotely prized as symbols or else grasped as trophies to commemorate the nearing of the goal: but for the most part they rank candidly as avocational interests. I find nowhere in Joseph Hergesheimer’s stories any record of intimacy and confidence between a man and a woman.... And this too, I think, reflects that all-important formative fourteen years wherein, whatever may have been Mr. Hergesheimer’s conduct of his relatively unimportant physical life, his fundamental concernments were pursued in a realm, of necessity, uninhabited by women. Indeed, no woman can with real content permit the man whom she proprietorially cherishes to traffic in this queer lonely realm, and she cannot but secretly regard his visits thereto as a personal slight. So the creative literary artist is (when luckiest) at silent feud with his women, because the two are perpetually irritated by the failure of their joint effort to ignore the fact that she ranks necessarily as an avocational interest. THREE What, though, was the precise goal of the fourteen years of visually unproductive “writing”? Those earlier stories have never been printed, so that one perforce advances on a bridge of guesswork. But certainly, in all that is to-day accessible of Mr. Hergesheimer’s creative feats—with one exception duly noted hereinafter—there is a patent negligence, and indeed an ostentatious avoidance, of any aiming toward popularity. That during the fourteen years young Hergesheimer labored toward the applause and cheques of a “best seller,” is to the considerate inconceivable. Nor could that well have been a motive strong enough to sustain him thus long, since the maker of reading-matter, like any other tradesman, has need of quick returns where the artist battens on immediate rejections.