You ask me a pretty difficult question--I have no absolute rule for saying yes or no to a short story and, as far as that goes, I don’t think any other editor has. There are such things in magazine offices as editorial policies, but if they are good editorial policies they must be more or less elastic, subject to change without notice and not very well defined anyway. Folks come in and ask me what kind of stories _Pictorial Review_ likes. The only answer I can give is “good stories.” If they ask why I buy this story and not that, I would say because I think it more interesting than the other, but to go further and to ask me to explain precisely why it is the more interesting is too much for me. There may be editors who can sit down and in a magic manner tell just exactly why they bought this story and refused that, but they must be smarter editors than I am. I really cannot do it with sincerity or conviction and do not try. Do I buy stories because I like them myself or because I think our readers will like them? That’s another sticker. I generally buy stories because I like them myself, because if I disregarded my own taste and tried to pick out a story that our readers would like and which I didn’t like, I would be hopelessly at sea all the time. I would really feel ashamed of myself were I to publish a story which I personally thought to be piffle just because I thought it would “sell the magazine.” Moreover, I don’t think any editor knows just what his readers like or _might_ like except in a general way. We have no exact way of telling and my experience has been to follow my own judgment and, when the Circulation Manager comes along and tells me the circulation of the magazine is increasing by leaps and bounds, I am then licensed to feel that my judgment must have been good. Because I am just a plain, ordinary type of person and there must be hundreds of thousands and millions of people in the country like me; and what interests me will quite generally interest them, at least I have found it so. Don’t take from this that the Circulation Manager comes along every month and tells me the circulation of the magazine is increasing by leaps and bounds, but sometimes he does, and then I know a certain story or serial in the magazine got across in a big way; but what does that mean? It doesn’t mean that I can go out off-hand and get another story just like it and ring the bell again. We don’t buy stories that way--writers do not write them that way--I wish they did because the editor’s job would be easy.