Yes, it is the boy's illogical pertinacity which is the fable's point, because that pertinacity at once explains why nearly all the men in Mr. Hergesheimer's books are hag-ridden by one or another sole desire which spurs them toward a definite goal, through every instant of their mimic lives. These men but variously reflect, I take it, that younger Hergesheimer's "will to write," that wholly selfish and unconquerable will. To Mr. Hergesheimer, even to-day, it probably seems natural that a man's whole living should be devoted to the attaining of one desire quite clearly perceived, because once his own life was thus dedicated.... The more shrewd mass of practical persons that go about in flesh are otherwise; and comfortably fritter through the day, with no larger objective at any time in mind than the catching of a car, the rounding off of a business transaction, the keeping of an engagement for luncheon, and the vesperal attendance to some unmental form of recreation,--with one small interest displacing another in endless succession, until bed-time arrives and the undertaker tucks them in. Those fourteen years explain to me the Hergesheimer women, too, those somewhat troublingly ornamental odalisques. They are fine costly toys, tricked out in curious tissues: and, waiting for the strong male's leisure, they smile cryptically. They will divert him by and by, when the day's work is despatched, maintaining their own thoughts inviolate, even in that treacherous instant of comminglement wherein the strongest of men must abate reserve. But their moment is not daylit, for the Hergesheimer women are all-incongruous with what is done during office-hours, nor are they to be valued then. Sometimes they are embodied ideals, to be sure, remotely prized as symbols or else grasped as trophies to commemorate the nearing of the goal: but for the most part they rank candidly as avocational interests. I find nowhere in Joseph Hergesheimer's stories any record of intimacy and confidence between a man and a woman.... And this too, I think, reflects that all-important formative fourteen years wherein, whatever may have been Mr. Hergesheimer's conduct of his relatively unimportant physical life, his fundamental concernments were pursued in a realm, of necessity, uninhabited by women.