The story is told with expertness, without indirection, with a fine control of suspense and with thrill after thrill. The finest thing about it is the constant discovery to the reader of the author’s thorough knowledge of her people and her setting. Assuming that it could have been written by an American, it must have been preceded by weeks of study supplemented by foreign travel; whether a person not born and bred as Demetra Vaka was could have written it, even after extensive “documentation,” seems doubtful. We should say the thing would be quite impossible were we not mindful of the late F. Marion Crawford, of whose ingenious and convincing tales Mrs. Brown’s inevitably remind us. He, too, wrote one or more novels of Constantinople, with what historical accuracy we can’t undertake to speculate. Possibly Mrs. Brown can pick a hundred holes in them respecting matters of fact! However, they had, for the American reader, an effect of perfect verisimilitude, and it is this effect precisely that Mrs. Brown’s stories are enriched with. Only, in her case, we know that the likeness to truth is felt because the truth is there. She should do for us hereafter, if her restless spirit will permit, what Crawford did. Give us romances, Demetra Vaka, give us the East; stay with us, write for us novel after novel of the sort that used to come, one or two a year, from that villa at Sorrento where lived so long and wrought so faithfully the creator of Dr. Isaacs and the chronicler of the braveries of Prince Saracinesca! BOOKS BY DEMETRA VAKA _The First Secretary_, 1907. _Haremlik_, 1909. _The Duke’s Price_, 1910. _Finella in Fairyland_, 1910. _In the Shadow of Islam_, 1911. _A Child of the Orient_, 1914. _The Grasp of the Sultan_, 1916. _The Heart of the Balkans_, 1917. _In the Heart of German Intrigue_, 1918. _Demetra Vaka’s books are published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston._ CHAPTER XXIV EDNA FERBER The most interesting thing about Edna Ferber is that she was born in Kalamazoo. No, the most interesting thing is that she threw her first novel in the wastebasket whence, like Kipling’s _Recessional_, it was retrieved by another. No, no! the most interesting thing about Edna Ferber is that she’s a superb short story writer, one of the best in America, one of the dozen best. You are all wrong. The supremely interesting fact about Edna Ferber is this: She invented the Tired Business Woman. When writing about Miss Ferber why be dull? Why go in for the higher criticism? As for the lower criticism, we hope we are above it. Certainly _she_ is.