The old-fashioned American has preached us a tremendous and moving sermon, putting his whole heart into it; and it would be pleasant to be able to express for it the same unquestioning reverence as Mr. Robert W. Chambers, who writes the introduction to the book. But truth requires me to point out that Phillips avoids having his heroine contract venereal disease--something which might decidedly have affected the beauty of her soul. Also, she manages to preserve her beauty, in spite of the part which getting men drunk plays in the life of a street-walker. In other words, he idealizes prostitution as a career for women, in order to give it the advantage over the box factory. It is very significant that he fails to take us into this factory and show us the work; all we get is Susan’s interviews with the boss in his office. We do not meet the other women, except the one with whom Susan starves in her tenement room. So we fail to realize that Susan’s solution of her problem is not the solution for all women. There have to be boxes, as well as sex gratification, in the capitalist world; and thousands of women must hold their box-making jobs. They lose their hair and teeth, sometimes their fingers, and always their beauty; but they acquire class-consciousness; and here and there a genius among them, by incredible heroic labors, gets a bit of knowledge and becomes a leader. So, out of the whole mass-misery results organization, and that labor movement which is the germ of the new society, taking form, according to the wondrous process of nature, inside the shell of the old. But of all this we get no hint in “Susan Lenox”; a middle-class story, written by a middle-class man about a middle-class girl who descends for a short period into the inferno of working-class life, and then magically rises out of it again. If David Graham Phillips had written the story of a working-class girl, who stayed with the working class and learned working-class lessons--why then all critics would have indicted him for the crime of having a “panacea,” and “Susan Lenox” would have waited, not five years, but fifty years, for publication in a popular magazine! CHAPTER CVII BAGDAD-ON-THE-SUBWAY The short story writer who signed the pen name O. Henry burst like a meteor upon the magazine world of New York. His first stories appeared in 1902, when he had only eight years of life before him. In that time he became the recognized king of the craft; everybody read him, high and low, those skilled in writing as well as the plain people with whose fates he dealt. He poured out his stories at the rate of one or two every week, and if he did not get the highest prices ever heard of, it was because he cared nothing about money and did not trouble to claim his own.