It is only the best sellers nowadays who are writing stories, really writing stories, stories for their own sakes. That is why they are best sellers. They may be bad stories that they are telling, or rather they may be telling the stories badly. For there is no such thing as a new story--it is the treatment that is all-important. But they are stories; and most of their authors, if they chose, if they thought it worth the doing, could write the sort of novel with three hundred readers that would get half a column of serious consideration in the cultured weeklies. Berta Ruck, for instance. I do not know if her books are ever reviewed in the sixpenny weeklies; I should be inclined to doubt it. But I have not the slightest doubt that her books are a great deal better than the majority of novels that are so honoured. She writes very jolly stories about very jolly people. They begin with a highly improbable situation. A woman persuades a man to become her husband in name so that she can attend to her business unbothered by the attentions of a crowd of suitors. A financier, to pacify his match-making parents, engages a secretary to act as his official fiancée. A girl dresses up as a boy and becomes a chauffeur. Highly improbable occurrences, undoubtedly. But it is permissible to open on a situation of any degree of improbability, provided the characters subsequently behave according to rule. And Berta Ruck’s characters do. They are real people. And what is more important, they are very jolly people. One has a genuine affection for them, which is more than one can say of most modern novels. How often do we come across a hero and a heroine that we really like, that we really want to see in the last chapter happily married to the right person? We do in a Berta Ruck novel, and we will pardon any stretching of coincidence if it allows that fortunate encounter on the last page. To be able to do that, to be able to write a jolly book about jolly people is very much more worth while than.... But we will be neither personal nor malicious. Let us be content to state that it would be certainly more charitable, and probably more accurate to assume that a book sells on account of its qualities rather than its defects.