I said that Florence Barclay was an equivalent for Turgenev. But I could wish that, eleven years ago, I had elected to read some popular writer in whom I could trace a closer parallel, a similarity of plot as well as atmosphere. For it would not be difficult to find in the _Family Herald_ stories that would in synopsis seem to resemble very closely those of Turgenev. The plot of _On the Eve_ or _A House of Gentlefolk_ might well have appealed to the writer of slushy sentimental romances. In the type of story that Turgenev wrote, the story of memory and regret, the boundary between excellence and rubbish is very narrow, and only a lax sentimentalist or a man of genius would attempt to tell it. Talent would be frightened by the simple triangle of _Spring Floods_ and of _Smoke_. It would seem ordinary, as would that of _Rudin_ and _The House of Gentlefolk_. A man’s wife is unfaithful. He leaves her, and in time, believing her to be dead, falls in love with a young girl and proposes marriage. But the wife returns and his happiness is shattered. “What!” says the professional novelist, “that old theme; the person who returns from the grave at the eleventh hour and upsets everything. But that has been done a hundred times. It is impossibly _vieux jeu_. In farce, in light opera, perhaps, but in serious drama....” The writer of talent must take unusual and difficult situations. He must find originality in the employment of new material. The broad field has been ploughed too many times, has yielded too many harvests. It must lie fallow for a while.