If young writers must imitate, must go through a period of playing the sedulous ape, as Stevenson called it, we hope that more of them will cease to imitate the Great and Peculiar Few and imitate such exemplars of intelligent and growing naturalism as Mrs. Underwood. It will make the approach to a recognition of their own powers less painful. And for Sophie Kerr we hope only that she may continue as she has begun and keep growing. BOOKS BY SOPHIE KERR _Love at Large_, 1916. _The Blue Envelope_, 1917. _The Golden Block_, 1918. _The See-Saw_, 1919. _Painted Meadows_, 1920. _One Thing Is Certain_, 1922. _Love at Large was published by Harper & Brothers, New York. The Blue Envelope, The Golden Block and The See Saw were published by Doubleday, Page & Company, New York; the last two books were published by George H. Doran Company, New York._ CHAPTER XIX MARJORIE BENTON COOKE Of course Marjorie Benton Cooke is Bambi, or, if you prefer, Bambi is simply Marjorie Benton Cooke. The heroine of the most amusing novel by an American woman in many, many years couldn’t be solely the product of an imagination however fine. She couldn’t be anything but an imaginative introspection--by which we mean that Miss Cooke could only have created her by following the advice of O. Henry and others before him, to “look into your heart and write.” No matter if not a single event of Bambi’s life is autobiographical; no matter if her Father Professor with his mathematical flowerbeds never lived; still less if Jarvis Jocelyn is a pure fantasy. The point is that to write Bambi Miss Cooke had to put her real self in the midst of imagined people and subject her real self to imagined events. This is completely different from the usual method of the skilled fictioneer. He builds his hero or heroine in the first place, but having made the character and infused into it the breath of life the character does the rest. The writer has little governance over his character’s actions; these are determined by the character himself and the writer does not much more than set them down. Incredible? Not in the least. Thackeray, Scott--we don’t know how many writers--testify to the obstinacy with which their people insist on being themselves. Why, an author is really no better off than a parent who brings a child into the world. The parent may transmit to the child certain traits and the author may endow his person with certain qualities; but as the child grows up he takes his own course rather oftener than not, and the fictional person does always! Or if he doesn’t we see the author jerking the strings and despise him for it, for the story rings false.