So it is quite conceivably the impurest sort of envy and low-mindedness which causes me here to suspect alarming symptoms. I, in any event, put aside _The Happy End_ with very real discomfort; and turn to the reflection that Mr. Hergesheimer has since written _Linda Condon_, which discomforts me quite as poignantly by exposing to me my poverty in phrases sufficiently noble to apply to this wholly admirable book. SEVEN Yet Mr. Hergesheimer, even in the least worthy of his magazine stories, writes really well. The phrase has an inadequate ring: but when you have applied it without any grave reservation to Mr. Tarkington and Mr. Hergesheimer, and have given Mrs. Wharton a deservedly high rating for as many merits as seem possible to a woman writer, of what other American novelists can this pardonably be said by anybody save their publishers? No: the remainder of us, whatever and however weighty may be our other merits, can manage, in this matter of sheer writing, to select and arrange our adjectives and verbs and other literary ingredients acceptably enough every now and then: and that is the utmost which honesty can assert. But Mr. Hergesheimer always writes really well, once you have licensed his queer (and quite inexcusable) habit of so constantly interjecting proper names to explain to whom his, Hergesheimer’s, pronoun refers.... Perhaps I here drift too remotely into technicalities, and tend to substitute for a consideration of architecture a treatise upon brick-making. Even so, I cannot but note in this place how discriminatingly Mr. Hergesheimer avoids the hurdles most commonly taken with strained leaps by the “stylist,” through Mr. Hergesheimer’s parsimony in the employment of similes; and how inexplicably he renders “anything from a chimneypot to the shoulders of a duchess” by—somehow—communicating the exact appearance of the thing described without evading the whole issue by telling you it is like something else. EIGHT Now this non-employment of time-approved devices seems even the more remarkable when you consider how intensely Joseph Hergesheimer realizes the sensuous world of his characters and, in particular, the optic world. He is the most insistently superficial of all writers known to me, in his emphasis upon shapes and textures and pigments. His people are rendered from complexion to coat-tail buttons, and the reader is given precisely the creasing of each forehead and the pleating of their under-linen. Mr. Hergesheimer’s books contain whole warehousefuls of the most carefully finished furniture in literature; and at quaint bric-à-brac he has no English equal. It is all visioned, moreover, very minutely. Joseph Hergesheimer makes you observe his chairs and panelings and wall-papers and window-curtains with an abnormal scrutiny. The scenery and the weather, too, are “done” quite as painstakingly, but these are indigenous to ordinary novels.