A beautifully illustrative passage. It shows the Defoe method, the enumerative narration, at its best. So many writers would have failed to infect us with the feeling that Mrs. Watts conveys. It is not until you have stepped inside Sandra’s room and seen, bit by bit, what old Sarah Boardman saw, that you can share her feeling and understand how a very fine (but also very worldly) old lady came to kneel and “put up some lame petition for this girl.” The conclusion emphasizes what we said at the start of this discussion. Would you, well as you might have known Sarah Boardman, have known just how she would behave when her daughter-in-law caught her upon her knees in Sandra’s bedroom? Mrs. Watts knew, knew perfectly the rather pathetic deception the old lady’s pride--reserve, worldliness, whatever you choose to call it--would inspire; knew also the presence of mind which would enable her to effect it. In order of popularity Mrs. Watts’s books stand thus: _Nathan Burke_, then _The Legacy_, her next book after _Nathan Burke_; then _The Rise of Jennie Cushing_. The comparison is somewhat vitiated by the fact that _Van Cleve_, coming between _The Legacy_ and _Jennie Cushing_, was published serially in the _Atlantic Monthly_ and must have reached a great many of Mrs. Watts’s readers that way before it appeared in covers. _The Rudder_ was less successful than any of the others, though it is too early to judge of the popularity of _The Boardman Family_, published in the spring of 1918. For some reason which the present writer is unable to fathom, _The Rudder_ was criticised with a most unusual severity of opinion by those who “review” books and commonly mistake their opinions for infallible fact. I have been unable to perceive its inferiority to the bulk of Mrs. Watts’s work. It is a less dramatic story, so far as external incident goes, than most of the novels, but in its portraiture, its fidelity to personal characteristics, its humor, its sharpness of observation and skillful selection for recording, _The Rudder_ leaves nothing to be desired. I should rate it with _The Legacy_ while freely conceding that the developed story of the girl and woman, Letty Breen, chief figure in _The Legacy_, more readily holds the average reader’s attention and interest.