"Spring, the sweet spring!" Then birds do sing, hey-ding-a-ding--and so on.... Sweet lovers love the spring.... Jimmy, Phil and I saw little of each other those days. Jimmy clouded his sunny brow and started in working overtime. Phil plunged headlong into what was to have proved his philosophical _magnum opus_--"The Pluralistic Fallacy; a Critical Study of Pragmatism." I also plunged headlong into a series of interpretative essays for Heywood Sampson's forthcoming review. My first essay was to be on Tolstoy; my second, on Nietzsche; my third, on Anatole France; my fourth, on Samuel Butler and Bernard Shaw; my fifth, on Thomas Hardy; and my sixth and last, on Walt Whitman. From the works of these writers it was my purpose to illustrate and clarify for the semicultured the more significant intellectual and spiritual tendencies of our enlightened and humane civilization. It is characteristic that I supposed myself well equipped for this task. But I never got beyond my detached, urbane appreciation of Nietzsche; just as I had concluded it--our enlightened and humane civilization suddenly blew to atoms with a _cliché_-shattering report and a vile stench as of too-long-imprisoned gas.... III During those first months of Susan's absence, which for more than four years were to prove the last months of almost world-wide and wholly world-deceptive peace, several things occurred of more or less importance to the present history. They marked, for one thing, the auspicious sprouting and rapid initial growth of Susan's literary reputation. Her poems appeared little more than a month after she had left us, a well-printed volume of less than a hundred pages, in a sober green cover. I had taken a lonely sort of joy in reading and rereading the proof; and if even a split letter escaped me, it has not yet been brought to my attention. These poems were issued under a quiet title and an unobtrusive pen-name, slipping into the market-place without any preliminary puffing, and I feared they were of too fine a texture to attract the notice that I felt they deserved. But in some respects, at least, Susan was born under a lucky star. An unforeseen combination of events suddenly focused public attention--just long enough to send it into a third edition--upon this inconspicuous little book.