These are strong words. Gush, some will call them. Well, among the people of repressed instincts there is one instinct seldom repressed--the instinct to sneer at those who let themselves go. This is an inconsistency which will trouble them (we point it out that they may give themselves over to their favorite delight of self-torture) but which bothers the rest of us not at all. We know--the rest of us--full well that the emotionalism of which Mrs. Richmond is the most successful exponent is a cleansing and refreshing exercise. We read her and come away a little surer of ourselves and of the world about us. For the essence of that world is the people in it and there is something in most people that does not change. Mrs. Richmond has written many books. The only exact fact to be stated is that in 1914--and several of her most successful books have appeared since--she had sold 400,000 copies. The total must be well on to the million mark by now. Then there are the cheaper editions of her earlier stories; there are the readers of her work in the _Ladies’ Home Journal_ and other publications; there are the libraries where copies of her are always “out” and there are new circles of readers, each book being much like a stone breaking the surface of a pond and making its own widening ripples;--no matter. Millions read Mrs. Richmond. That is enough to know. It is the achievement of a quiet, country-dwelling woman whose publishers have a time to get her to be photographed! She lives in Fredonia, New York, and the sketch of her life is a bare outline. She was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, the daughter of the Rev. Charles Edwards Smith, D.D., and Catherine A. (Kimball) Smith. Her father was a Baptist clergyman, the author of _The Baptism of Fire_ and _The World Lighted_. Grace was an only child. While she was still a young girl the family moved to Syracuse, New York. There the daughter was educated in the Syracuse High School and under private tutors, following college courses of study under their direction. She gave some indications of the writer’s gift before her marriage, in 1887, to Dr. Nelson Guernsey Richmond of Fredonia. But the wife of a young physician with a growing practice has not a great deal of leisure. It was not until 1891 that Mrs. Richmond, whose first work was short stories for magazines, attracted special attention by a story which appeared in the Thanksgiving number of the _Ladies’ Home Journal_.