Mrs. Martin, like Marjorie Benton Cooke and Harriet T. Comstock, is interested in social questions. She has decided views on bringing up children, wealth and poverty; she does not subscribe to Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s views of motherhood; she is not a feminist in any general meaning of the word, because she believes that feminism in many of its aspects is a passing phase. As a rule her preoccupation with these problems is kept out of her work--the older generation of the people she wrote about were blandly unaware that such questions reared their heads--but her last two novels, _Gertie Swartz: Fanatic or Christian?_ and _Maggie of Virginsburg_, introduce them extensively and disastrously. Mrs. Martin’s failure with _Gertie Swartz_ arose entirely from her inability to assimilate such matter _before_ writing her story. As a result industrial conditions and employees’ welfare are indigestible lumps in the novel. Some subjects cannot be introduced bodily into a piece of fiction. They must arise as they arise in life out of situations and character. They cannot be discussed in a story as they are discussed from a platform. They can only act upon the people of the tale or be acted upon by them; they can be discussed, if the representation of life is to be fairly accurate, only to the extent that the situations of the story call for. It is true that life contains many futile and windy discussions, some academic, some not; but the only things that count are those which involve action or precipitate action or express or mold character. The novelist must exclude all else, otherwise the novel will lack illusion and resemble nothing so much as the minutes of the last meeting of the Society for the Suppression of Sociological Sores. _Gertie Swartz_ aside, the real controversy over Mrs. Martin’s work arises from her studies of Pennsylvania Dutch life, and is of a sort to give satisfaction to her as a writer. For the very nature of the controversy carries with it the plain implication that she has got under the skin of her people. It is alleged and deposed that she does not do the Pennsylvania Dutch justice. The allegation was most completely made in the New York _Evening Post_ for April 29, 1916, by Isaac R. Pennypacker.