Let it be said at the outset that she makes slips which would be inexcusable if we did not all make the same slips. In the second chapter of _Red Pepper’s Patients_ Dr. Burns has sheltered a Hungarian violinist who is now playing for the physician and his wife: “Warmed and fed, his Latin nature leaping up from its deep depression to the exaltation of the hour, the appeal he made to them was intensely pathetic.” The Hungarians are not a Latin race, but we know what she means, so why be bothered? “His attitude, as he stood before his hosts, had the unconscious grace of the foreigner.” Of any foreigner--they are all graceful! Hang it! We always think of them as unconsciously graceful. Why quibble? Mrs. Richmond can be humorous in the most natural way. From _The Twenty-fourth of June_: “‘Rufus,’ said his wife solemnly, following him into the white-tiled bathroom, ‘I want you should look at those bath-towels. I never in my life set eyes on anything like them. They must have cost--I don’t know what they cost--I didn’t know there were such bath-towels made!’ “‘I don’t want to wrap myself in a blanket,’ asserted her husband. ‘I want to know I’ve got a towel in my hand, that I can whisk round me and slap myself with. Look here, let’s get to bed.... “‘Ruth,’ said he, with sudden solemnity, ‘I forgot to undress in my dressing-room. Had I better put my clothes on and go take ’em off again in there?’” It is funny because it is so exactly what we do say in such situations. It is naturalism of a very high order and the more humorous for being entirely unforced. In the creation of character Mrs. Richmond is at her best simply because she differentiates her people ever so slightly from what, lacking a better word, we generally call types. Her main triumph is evenly shared in this field and that other, of which we spoke at the outset. _Red Pepper Burns_ was a very great success as novels go and Redfield Pepper Burns is a very distinct success as the persons of fiction go; but the Christmas stories that Mrs. Richmond has written and such intimate little heart messages as _The Enlisting Wife_ and _The Whistling Mother_ are just as successful. Take the opening of _The Enlisting Wife_: “Judith Taine, who was married to Lieutenant Kirke Wendell, Junior, just before he sailed for France, is keeping in a small blue book a little record which he may see when he returns. It begins with the last paragraph of a letter from her young husband.