_The Tenants_, 1908. _Nathan Burke_, 1910. _The Legacy_, 1911. _Van Cleve: His Friends and His Family_, 1913. _The Rise of Jennie Cushing_, 1914. _The Rudder_, 1916. _Three Short Plays_, 1917. _The Boardman Family_, 1918. _From Father to Son_, 1919. _The Noon Mark_, 1920. _The House of Rimmon_, 1922. _Mrs. Watts’s books are published by the Macmillan Company, New York._ CHAPTER XV MARY E. WILKINS FREEMAN If this chapter on Mary Wilkins Freeman, one of the best known of American writers, seems disappointingly short, the explanation is to be found in three considerations: Mrs. Freeman is primarily a short story writer and not a novelist. Her successes have been with short stories, and they have been many. Both as a short story writer and as a novelist her work is unimportant, largely ephemeral and extremely overrated. Ephemerality in itself does not matter; most things are ephemeral measured by any absolute standards. Books come and go, opinions change as they ought to; the fleeting quality of the mass of fiction is to be taken as a matter of course; but when there is a persistent effort to maintain that such writing as Mrs. Freeman’s has any permanent value as a contribution to literature, it is necessary to deny strongly and without qualification even at some risk of doing her really excellent work injustice. The reader must not construe what we say about her work as an expression of opinion, but as an assertion of fact. Dogma against dogma! Mr. Howells and his school have so long instructed us to accept without question their estimates of her work that it becomes imperative to cut the ground from under them. They insist upon the literary value of such writing as Mrs. Freeman’s. There is no such thing as literary value in writing. There are no literary values, there are only values in life. And what is Mrs. Freeman’s value in life? Slight, reminiscential, pleasing, sometimes entertaining, occasionally revelatory of human nature, but never for a moment revealing anything unexpected, never anything of which we have not been perfectly aware--her stories are cordially welcome and likeable (in general) without having the slightest relation to the business of living. We read them and sustain a faint consciousness that _once_ in some place among a few people they may have had some bearing on life. We read them and observe that in the main they are told skillfully. We are very glad to have them--and that is all. The third reason for the brevity with which we deal with her is purely historical. If this book were being written in 1898 instead of 1918, she would occupy, and rightly, a considerable space in it. But as recently as 1914 a book of her stories was put out with the short story, _The Copy-Cat_, occupying first place in it and giving its title to the book! The story deals with a little girl, Amelia, who was forever imitating another little girl, Lily. Amelia was plain and Lily was pretty: