She has further the largeness of mind and tolerant humor to study all and understand all and set everything down with unfailing gusto. Nothing is too mean or too shabby, too pretentious or too lofty for her eyes and her pen. She delineates insufferable young men like George Ducey in _Nathan Burke_ and Everett Boardman in _The Boardman Family_ whom Gene Stratton-Porter would not touch with a pitchfork and whom Edith Wharton could never render adequately. But Lord! these young men must be of some use in the world, we can fancy Mrs. Watts saying with a smile, else it’s not likely they’d be here! The fact that they are here and have to be reckoned with is enough. Let us see what is to be made of them. And she proceeds to show us what _is_ made of them--not a pretty spectacle, to be sure, not pointing a clear moral, maybe, but worth our while if only to remind us of what we don’t know. We suspect that Mrs. Watts would subscribe without reservation to Conrad’s notion that trying to find the moral of our existences is in the main futile. Do you recall his words in _A Personal Record_? “The ethical view of the universe involves us at last in so many cruel and absurd contradictions, where the last vestiges of faith, hope, charity, and even of reason itself, seem ready to perish, that I have come to suspect that the aim of creation cannot be ethical at all. I would fondly believe that its object is purely spectacular: a spectacle for awe, love, adoration, or hate, if you like, but in this view--and in this view alone--never for despair! Those visions, delicious or poignant, are a moral end in themselves. The rest is our affair--the laughter, the tears, the tenderness, the indignation, the high tranquillity of a steeled heart, the detached curiosity of a subtle mind--that’s our affair!” It is, O master! Mrs. Watts has always made it very much her affair, from _Nathan Burke_ to the present hour. In her is laughter, as when, in _The Rudder_, Marshall Cook, the author, inspects the plant of Amzi Loring, the “ice king.” Mr. Loring is a self-made man. Cook watches the machinery spill blocks of ice weighing 300 pounds each. “‘Beautifully clear! I was just thinking it was like a great glass box,’ said Cook. ‘It had no look of being solid.’ “‘Um-huh. Well, I _have_ seen things put inside it,’ said the other, sly anticipation suddenly appearing on his features. He nodded significantly to the puller; and presently with another clang, another wail of escaping air, there boomed down upon the runway and fled past them another three hundred pounds with a dark object embedded in the middle of it, at sight of which Cook gave an exclamation. “‘What!’ he shouted, rushing to peer after it. “‘I told ’em to save out that cake and send it up to the house for you,’ said Amzi One, smiling, well-pleased. ‘You’ll see it again when you get home.’” A copy of Mr. Cook’s latest book had been frozen in the ice cake.