I was made uneasy because I reasoned in this way: when Mr. Hergesheimer is writing a short story to be printed next to advertising matter in some justly popular periodical, Mr. Hergesheimer, being rational and human, cannot but think of the subscribers to that popular periodical. I forget, I repeat, how many millions of them have been duly attested upon affidavit to exist, but certainly not many thousands of our fellow citizens can regard Mr. Hergesheimer at his best and purest with anything save bewildered abhorrence. So he must compromise,--subconsciously, I believe,--and must adapt his methods to the idiosyncrasies and the limitations of his audience, very much as he probably refrains from addressing his chauffeur in the heightened and consummated English of _San Cristóbal de la Habana_. The danger, I reflected, was not that Joseph Hergesheimer would lower his ideals, nor in anything alter what he wished to communicate; but was the fact that he must attempt to transmit these things into the vernacular and into the orbits of thought of his enormous audience, with the immaculate motive of making his ideas comprehensible. He could not, being rational and human, but by and by be tempted yet further to endeavor--as he had flagrantly endeavored in the tale called "Tol'able David,"--to convey his wayside apprehensions of life via some such always acceptable vehicle as the prehistoric fairy-tale cliché of the scorned and ultimately victorious third champion. This was with a vengeance the pouring of new wine into a usage-battered and always brazen cup which spoiled the brew.... Six of these stories, then, were beautifully written moral tales: although, to be sure, there was an alleviating seventh, in "The Flower of Spain," which was a well-nigh perfect and a profoundly immoral work of art. I therefore put aside this volume with discomfort.... But I suspect that here the axiomatic mutual jealousy of all authors should be discounted. As an "outsider" in letters, I could not, at the time to which I refer, be expected to view with equanimity the then recent installation of Mr. Hergesheimer in the American National Institute of Arts and Letters, wherein the other representatives of creative literature were such approved masters as Mr. Nelson Lloyd, Mr. Will Payne, Mr. Robert W. Chambers and Professor Hermann Hagedorn. At this port, once so neatly charted as "the Ellis Island of the Academy," had the skipper of _The Happy End_ arrived. The fact had been formally recognized by our best-thought-of cultural element, that in artistic achievement Joseph Hergesheimer had but fifty living superiors, and only a hundred and ninety-nine equals, at that moment resident in the United States: and I, who had not been tendered any such accolade, could not but be aware of human twinges when Mr. Hergesheimer as a matter of course accepted this distinction.