“Oh, it’s real enough,” said the blonde lady. “It must be. You should have seen the letters she received! Amazing, some of them.” “Anita, they amazed _her_. I remember her getting one while she was staying with us. She looked thoroughly frightened. She said—‘But, Lila, I didn’t realize—it was just a story. But this poor thing, she says it’s true! She says it’s happened to her! What are we to do?’ You know, she was nearly crying. It was some hysterical woman who had read the book. But Madala always believed in people. I know she wrote to her. I believe she helped her. But she never told you much about her doings.” “Oh, her sentimental side doesn’t interest me. What I ask myself is—how does she know, as she obviously does know, all that her wretched drab of a heroine thought and felt and suffered?” “Instinct! Imagination!” said the Baxter girl. “It must be the explanation.” “It isn’t. It isn’t. Oh, I’ve puzzled it out. I’m convinced that from the beginning it’s experience. Don’t flare, Lila, I don’t mean literal experience. Not in _Eden Walls_, anyhow. Later, of course—but we’re discussing _Eden Walls_. Imagination, do you say, Beryl? But the imagination must have a fact for its root. I’ll grant you that imagination is so essentially a quality of youth that the merest rootlet of a reality is enough to set a young artist beanstalk climbing. But the older he grows, the wiser, the more versed in reality, the less he trusts his imagination, the more, in consequence, his imagination flags and withers; till he ends—one sees it happen again and again—as the recorder merely of his own actual experiences and emotions. It’s only the greatest who escape that decay of the imagination. Do you think that Madala did? Look at _Eden Walls_. Remember what we know about her. Can’t you see that the skeleton of _Eden Walls_ is Madala’s own life? Consider her history. She leaves what seems to have been a happy childhood behind her and sets out on adventure—very young. So does the woman in _Eden Walls_. The parallel’s exact. Madala’s Westering Hill and the _Breckonridge_ of the novel are the same place. The house, the lane, the country-side, she doesn’t trouble to disguise them. Again—Madala’s adventure is ushered in by calamity: and tragedy—(you can see the artist transmuting the mere physical calamity into tragedy) tragedy happens to the woman in _Eden Walls_. Remember how much more Madala dwelt on the sense of loneliness and lovelessness, on the anguish of the loss of something to love her, than on what one might call the—er—official emotions of a betrayed woman. Didn’t it strike you? Doesn’t that show that she was depending on her experience rather than on her imagination, fitting her own private grief to an imaginary case? Then, in America, she has the struggle for meat and drink, for mere existence. So does the woman in _Eden Walls_. Madala does not go under. The woman in _Eden Walls_ does. It’s the first real difference. But I maintain that in