The other is introspective—grows from within. The best definition of it, is, I love to think, _God-given_; and its genius is limited only to what God has put there in the beginning. It copies from no man—it is Master. Its flow is limitless, like the great tides of the greater ocean, and, like them, it grows as it goes. It does nothing twice the same way—every book is different, every poem, every mood. For books and poems are merely the moods of Genius. There is no place in literature for the practical, the poised, the balanced, the consistent, the saving, the so-called sound men and women of the world. To these God gave the all-sufficient talent of taking care of themselves. To Genius he gave the greater gift of caring for all humanity. “Helena Richie” is introspective. “Fenwick’s Career” is retrospective, and between them is a gulf boundless. Woman, by nature, writes the spiritual novel. Men write the novels which _do_. Neither of the novels above, in the man-sense, _do_. Because they were not written by men. Compare “The Awakening of Helena Richie” with “The Scarlet Letter.” Hawthorne’s woman and her preacher _did things_—people did things all through his masterpiece. And they reaped all the infamy and anguish of it—the illegitimate child, the pillory—death. And yet Hester Prynne and her preacher-lover had more excuse for their real wrong-doing than the business love-pair who set up their convenient and quasi establishment in the village of Dr. Lavendar. For the Puritan people had the excuse of youth—of passion—and the greater man-excuse of nature and by them called _nature-given_. But they forget that since the beginning God has been improving on nature. Helena and her lover merely played with passion; the others were passion. In Mrs. Deland’s people the fires were out—it was a weak, sordid, dissatisfied, half revengeful spoiled child determination to be naughty for naughty’s sake. They were a materialistic pair of polite adulterers, doing no harm to society, for they left no scarlet track, and none to themselves, for they were incapable of being hurt. No man writer would care to have picked up their miserable and naughty little affair; and instead of ending as it did, they might as well have been permitted to go on into the society of some city near them among those of their kind and claimed they had been married. And not a gossiper of their set, had she found it out, would have gone two blocks to tell it to another.