But why accuse _me_ of his sentiments? I’m only turning a searchlight on him. The thing is exasperating, not less so because it is a sort of left-handed tribute to the verisimilitude I am always striving after. In the preface to one of his books the late Mr. William de Morgan speaks his mind earnestly about the same kind of injustice; and I am further reminded of a story about Thackeray, who, on being reproached for ‘making So-and-So and Such-a-One act that way,’ retorted: ‘Why, Good Lord, _I_ didn’t do it. They did it themselves!’ So, if I err, at least I err in good company. “This letter is already too long. With very many thanks, and best wishes for the forthcoming book, I am “Sincerely yours, “MARY S. WATTS.” * * * * * Mrs. Watts’s candor should be attended by an equal candor on the part of the compiler of this book. Of course, despite the reporter’s rôle to which he endeavors pretty scrupulously to stick throughout these pages, he has his personal preferences; his readers have a right to know something about them if only that they may discount his statements at their own intellectual rates of exchange. What we have to say about Mrs. Watts may properly be prefaced, then, with the admission that, on the whole, we (a strictly editorial we) have received more permanent pleasure and satisfaction from her novels than from those of any other American woman. Let us try to make clear the grounds for this satisfaction and let us also try to place before the reader the solid merits of her work. Thackeray and Defoe, as she makes clear, have been most important of all writers to her; and she admired in Thackeray the conversational style with which he told his story; in Defoe she found the key to that non-conversational, simple, rather prosy, repetitive, completely realistic method of relation which is the best treatment in certain passages and which affords the reader--and the writer--necessary relief. But neither Thackeray nor Defoe, nor Swift, Hardy or any other had been able to help Mrs. Watts had she not possessed certain gifts evidenced in every one of her stories.