Why this should be so is a mystery. Unless the writer is even more than usually vain, or unless he is one of the very few whose books are in every home and whose opinions therefore presumably sway thousands (only I don’t believe they do), he must in his heart be aware that nothing he has written has had the slightest effect on any one, that nothing any one has written has had much effect, and that immortality is a myth. No, there he and I are wrong. There _is_ one way to literary immortality, a small immortality but assured: to have a book printed in the Tauchnitz Edition. Miss Rhoda Broughton’s name may be to the world at large but a shadowy memory, Mrs. Mackarness’s a total blank, but for ever and ever, on rainy afternoons, in dingy German or Italian _pensions_, elderly English spinsters will, in default of anything else to do, read tattered Tauchnitz copies of _Cometh Up as a Flower_ and _A Peerless Wife_. They will be bored--but they will read them. At any rate, your writer of novels, if he is to go on writing novels that at all satisfy him for the moment (though why he should, God knows!), must occasionally get rid of his opinions by means of a volume of essays; which does him good and does no one else any harm. And that is what I have set out to do here. CONTENTS PAGE PREFACE ix ON LIVING ABROAD 1 ZENITH 25 DISILLUSIONMENT 40 SOPHISTICATION 53 MEDITATIONS ABOUT WOMEN 69 LEGEND 85 TRUTH AND FICTION IN ITALY 97 LUIGI PIRANDELLO 116 THE FRENCH 139 PORNOGRAPHY 152 SUCCESS 166 BLACK-AND-WHITE 180 ON LIVING ABROAD This is not an essay in defence of living abroad nor yet a plea to others to choose such a life. Rather, it is in the nature of a dispassionate explanation intended respectfully for those who wonder why a good many Americans who are neither loafers nor sentimentalists endeavouring to escape backward into what they fancy to have been the Utopian life of the twelfth century (or was it the thirteenth?) do prefer living abroad to living at home.