There is no more to be said and it may easily be that too much has been said already. If this chapter has been too venturesome in its inferences and too declamatory in its exposition, forgive that, O reader! If you have read Miss Cather’s notable novels you may disagree but you will understand and condone; if you have not read them you will be more indulgent toward us after doing so; and actually if what we have said shall lead you to read her books the whole of our striving will have been fulfilled. She is a novelist whose work already adds measurably to American literature; whether all of us put the same estimate upon her accomplishment does not matter at all; it matters supremely that as many of us as possible should be acquainted with it. BOOKS BY WILLA SIBERT CATHER _April Twilights_, 1903. R. G. Badger, Boston. _The Troll Garden_, 1905. Doubleday, Page & Co., New York. _Alexander’s Bridge_, 1912. _O Pioneers!_ 1913. _The Song of the Lark_, 1915. _My Antonia_, 1918. _Youth and the Bright Medusa_, 1920. _One of Ours_, 1922. _Published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, but Youth and the Bright Medusa and One of Ours are published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York._ CHAPTER XXII CLARA LOUISE BURNHAM To write twenty-six books is something, is it not? To have written twenty-six books which have sold half a million copies (the publisher’s offhand guess) is something else again and more. Clara Louise Burnham has done that; and the cold arithmetical statement does not begin to convey the real nature of her achievement. You must read her to know how capable a novelist she is, how expert, how gifted with humor, insight, fertility in those slight inventions which make up the reality of a fictionist’s whole. Mrs. Burnham’s writings are associated in the minds of many thousands who have not read her tales, or have read only a few of them, with the doctrines of Christian Science. And it is true that she is the author of several novels in which the principles of this faith are of the essence of the stories. Equally true is it that she has said of her book, _Jewel_: “I like _Jewel_ best. I think she is my high water mark. It is a Christian Science book and without the Christian Science terminology that is used in the story it, well, it would be a kind of second _Little Lord Fauntleroy_, and besides, it wouldn’t be _Jewel_.” Which may be so but which does not hold true of _The Right Princess_. There the identification of Frances Rogers’s beliefs with the faith of which Mrs. Eddy was the founder is not indispensable to the narrative. Miss Rogers need not have been a Scientist. We should still have an unusual and effectively told story, a novel quite as entertaining and worth the reader’s while as _The Opened Shutters_, from which the terminology of the Scientists is entirely absent.