Does it sound like a good story? It does. And is it? It is. So good that you feel much more like telling it than analyzing it. But to “give it away” would be a very unfair piece of business. In analyzing it what shall we say? _The Blue Envelope_ is simple, straightforward, absorbing and thoroughly enjoyable because of the perfect naturalism of narration. We don’t mean realism--abused word! We mean naturalism. And what is naturalism? Why, simply the knack, art, faculty or gift of inventing incidents, drawing characters, writing conversation, describing action in such an unaffected manner that it all seems the most natural thing in the world! Now realism is never naturalism. A great realist may stick close to life and use actual occurrences or real people in his books but we call him a realist because he makes us see in what he sets before us things we never have seen before. Without any desire to be paradoxical--we are dead in earnest--it must be asserted flatly that the realist is as unreal as the romanticist. Often more so. The realist is simply one extreme, of which the romanticist is the other. The naturalist comes in between. And Sophie Kerr is first of all a naturalist in this special sense of the word. Whether her incidents are real or probable or unreal and improbable she never fails in making them plausible, completely so. It might be argued that to be perfectly and pleasantly and interestingly plausible is better than to achieve the most surprising realism or the most transcendental romance. We think that, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, it is; we believe that unless a writer has that gift in the nth degree commonly called genius, unless he is so matchless a romanticist as Joseph Conrad or so unsurpassed a realist as Flaubert or Thomas Hardy, he had better pray and struggle above everything for the faculty of plausibility, interesting plausibility, worth while naturalism! It is because we believe this that we hold Sophie Kerr to have found and to be on the right track. It is because of this our belief in her strong, fledged naturalism that we expect sound and excellent work from her, work showing distinct growth both in intrinsic value and in popular success. The first stage of that growth is evidenced for everybody in the contrast between _The Blue Envelope_ and its successor from her pen, _The Golden Block_.