The method of procuring data requires a fuller explanation. The writer who endeavors to present actual conditions in fictional form has constantly to choose between truth and facts, and if his readers accept his facts, they are inclined to doubt his imagination. In all of these four books, I have been careful to present only types, but I have tried to endow each type with character, and each character has assumed a living personality in my own mind. I have used no person and no event that was isolated; but, having individualized my types and chosen my typical events, I have felt free to employ the latter in whatever way seemed to me best fitted to enforce my argument, and at liberty to imagine what the former would think and do under the stress of the latter. I have heard of a dozen women in real life designated as the originals of Mary Denbigh, three wives selected as Muriel Stainton, and one man—myself—named as Dan Barnes. The discoverers of these prototypes only flattered my powers of detection and portraiture at the expense of my imagination and good taste. I intended to present, and I have presented, simply certain types produced by our civilization and working in the media of our economic system. I spent considerable time in New York last winter to procure certain data; I found the data, selected what was typical as I saw it, and made my story. "The Spider’s Web," whether well done or ill, has been done by my own imagination. Help I have had and eagerly sought. An historian always cites his authorities and acknowledges his assistants; I could never see why a novelist should be less honest or less courteous, since every realist must delegate some of his research-work, and even the writer of that fiction farthest from life must take something from the fancy of his acquaintances. I know, and I shall not soon forget, how much "The House of Bondage" owes to the encouragement given my work by its publishers. During the latter part of the actual writing of "The Spider’s Web," it was impossible for either my wife or me to be in New York, and I taxed the generous patience of many a friend by inquiries. I exacted tribute from Max Eastman’s editorials in "The Masses," Walter Lippmann’s papers in "The Forum," and C. P. Connolly’s in "Everybody’s Magazine" as expressing three current phases of American opinion; I even seized a picture from Mary Macdonald Brown’s accounts of New York and secured from an editorial in "The Nation" my reference to the past of the Astor House. Molière took his own where he found it; I have taken other men’s at my need. To all of these my score is long; to those few and fine newspaper and magazine critics and reviewers who have seen my purpose and helped it—who, when they have differed or blamed, blamed or differed honestly—to them, from whom I have learned so much, my obligation is still greater.