_The Golden Block_ is part of the life story of a business woman, Margaret Bailey, and the most important part. The novel finds her a secretary of Henry Golden, manufacturer of paving blocks, and leaves her his partner. It finds her practically a manager of his business at $40 a week and leaves her a sharer in his business at possibly $40,000 a year. The book begins on a note of success, of triumph; the Golden Company has got a contract for street paving in New York which means the difference between hundreds of thousands clear profit and bankruptcy. This has happened mainly because Margaret Bailey is a business woman--a much better business woman than Henry Golden is a business man. Now business women are not too attractively drawn in most of our fiction. They are new people, and the fictioneer is tempted to draw them in too harsh, too straight lines; to caricature a little as Dickens used to caricature, in order to bring out peculiarities and get the “effect.” Sophie Kerr doesn’t do it with Margaret Bailey; the most praiseworthy and most skillful thing in that admirable story _The Golden Block_ is the way in which the author keeps Margaret Bailey human. She does it by naturalism. Margaret is engrossed by the business of the Golden Company but she is also engrossed in securing the education of her sister and brother, the comfort and happiness of her father and mother, the welfare of the whole family. Breath of her life though business is, you feel all the time that she would sacrifice it completely if the happiness of Rose Bailey or the other Baileys collectively required such an offering. But of course the surest way to promote _their_ happiness is to succeed herself. Margaret Bailey is a character to be proud of and we hope Sophie Kerr is proud of her. She is as clear-visioned as any heroine of fiction; she is as clear-visioned as such women are in life! She is not afraid of being called unwomanly, because she knows that this only means that she does not conform to a handed-down ideal. She does not attempt to formulate a philosophy of sex or love or life on the basis of her own feelings. She speaks and thinks only for herself--not of herself except when asked to explain. She finds no time to indulge in self-pity, but that does not mean that she is hard. No! She is merely happy! She is doing what she can do best and what she most wants to do. “You ought to have been a man,” is the recurring refrain dinned in her ears, usually as a tribute of admiration but frequently with an implication of disapproval, as if the Creator had made a mistake somehow. “It’s my belief that there’s no sex in brains,” Margaret falls into the habit of replying. She might have added: “And there’s no brains in sex, either!”