Looking at the enterprise now Mrs. Brown is the first to concede its quixotism, its hopelessness, its ridiculousness from the start. And yet it proved immensely worth while in unsuspected ways. Going to London, the novelist succeeded in getting to Lloyd George; afterward she had access to other high personages in the Allied countries. Besides French she knows Italian. At Athens all doors were open to her. She interviewed not once but many times King Constantine himself and his generals. Afterward she went to Salonica and talked with Venizelos. When she had done she was able to write, purely as a reporter, _In the Heart of German Intrigue_, one of the notable exposés of the war. Out of the mouths of Constantine and his aides she convicted them. Her series of interlocking interviews built up a complete and fatal revelation of what Germany, with the connivance of Constantine’s government, had planned to do. Mrs. Brown’s work as a reporter of royalties and others and even her autobiographical books such as _A Child of the Orient_ and _Haremlik_ are, strictly considered, outside the scope of this sketch, which has to do with her primarily as an American novelist and a woman. As a novelist she has several books to her credit besides her initial offering, _The First Secretary_. _The Duke’s Price_, written with her husband; _Finella in Fairyland_, _In the Shadow of Islam_, and _The Grasp of the Sultan_, which was first published anonymously (“by?”), are all hers, as well as _The Heart of the Balkans_. Of all these _The Grasp of the Sultan_, which received serial publication and sold well even before the disclosure of the author’s identity, is the most interesting and most deserving of detailed consideration in this place. The novel was published in 1915 (as a book in June, 1916) and represents Demetra Vaka’s skill after some ten years’ apprenticeship at writing in English. A young Englishman, having wasted a fortune, drifts to Constantinople, and is appointed, through the agency of a countryman who has become a Turkish admiral, tutor to the imperial Ottoman princes. The youngest in his charge is 4-year-old Prince Bayazet, whose mother is a beautiful Greek girl of the harem. She has dared to defy the Sultan, who, failing in entreaty, strives to break her will by taking her son away from her. By a ruse of the head eunuch, she recovers the child and obtains the Sultan’s pledge that they shall be unmolested for five years. This is the background for a romance. The young English tutor falls in love with the Greek girl and plans to escape with her and the little Prince Bayazet.