Phillips was not content with preaching in his novels; he wrote a book, a general scolding at “The Age of Gilt.” Here you see the old-fashioned gentleman from Indiana, an individualist, but a hater of monopoly and privilege, a modern Isaiah denouncing graft and greed. The “Cosmopolitan Magazine” lured him into writing a series of articles about the gang which was selling out our government; “The Treason of the Senate,” the articles were called, and they made an enormous uproar. Theodore Roosevelt made a speech denouncing “muck-rake men,” which was very plainly aimed at Phillips. Afterwards, in his character as Mr. Facing-Bothways, Roosevelt made an attempt to get information from Phillips, for use in his fight against the Senate. Let me testify that only a few weeks before Roosevelt made this “muck-rake” speech, I sat at his dinner-table in the White House and heard him call the roll of these very same senators, naming them according to the interests they served--the senator from the Steel Trust, the senator from the Copper Trust, and so on. I recall the description of Hale of Maine, the senator from the Shipping Trust: “the most innately and essentially malevolent scoundrel that God Almighty ever put on earth!” The entire writing life of Phillips was barely ten years, and in that period he worked incessantly, rewriting and revising with painful conscientiousness. His stories were successful as serials, and I remember once teasing him because they were always of the right length for the purpose; I wished that mine would behave in that convenient way. The jest apparently troubled him, for he referred to it on several occasions. He did not tell me that for ten years he had been working in secret upon a novel of three hundred thousand words! He left that when he died, and it waited five years for a magazine to get up the courage to print extracts from it. We have it now in two volumes, “Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise.” Its heroine is a girl who bears the brand of illegitimacy, and runs away from home to escape it; but they bring her back and marry her off to an elderly farmer, and the picture of her bridal night is one of the unforgettable scenes of American fiction. Susan is ignorant of the world, a flower in the mud. Groping for light, she escapes again, and tries to earn her living in a box factory, and undergoes all the horrors of tenement life. Starved out, she takes to the streets in Cincinnati, and we see the graft and cruelty of city government. She is taken up as the mistress of a politician and travels with him in Europe. But always she is reaching toward something better; her spirit remains untarnished, and in the end she becomes a successful actress.