Since 1911 with short stories and a book a year there is nothing to chronicle but a progressive and uninterrupted success. Nothing except the Tired Business Woman. Make no mistake; this creation of Miss Ferber’s is _not_ a feminine counterpart of the Tired Business Man. The T. B. W. does not go to musical shows and sit in the front rows. She does not telephone home to the husband that she is sorry but important business will detain her downtown this evening. She does not bring home old friends unexpectedly to dinner, or worse, _not_ bring them home to dinner. She is man-less but not because she need be. She is unmarried or a widow. She has a boy, like Jock McChesney, and finds the task of making a man of him, in outside hours not devoted to earning their living, a woman-sized job! Give Edna Ferber credit for this, that she has done as much as the cleverest feminist to make the world see the self-reliant woman as she is, and not as the world deduces she may be. A woman, yes, and a mother, yes! But a regular person above everything else. Read, or re-read, _Emma McChesney & Co._ with this in a corner of your mind and you will be thankful to Miss Ferber when you have finished. Some thanks, too, may go to Ethel Barrymore, whose impersonation of the Tired But Admired (and admirable) Business Woman of Miss Ferber’s fiction reënforced the lesson of the book with the ocular demonstration of the play. Miss Ferber is going forward. The evidence of it will be found in the stories contained in her latest book, _Cheerful--By Request_ (1918) and perhaps particularly in the story in that volume called _The Gay Old Dog_. At thirty-one she has her best years--as literary records go--before her. No painstaking appraisal of her work would be wise at this time. In the next two or three years she may overshadow everything she has done so far. We hope so. Because then, bearing in mind that month’s initial difference, we shall have high hopes ourselves! BOOKS BY EDNA FERBER _Dawn O’Hara_, 1911. _Buttered Side Down_, 1912. _Roast Beef Medium_, 1913. _Personality Plus_, 1914. _Emma McChesney & Co._, 1915. _Fanny Herself_, 1917. _Cheerful--By Request_, 1918. _Half Portions_, 1920. _$1200 a Year_, 1920. _The Girls_, 1921. _Gigolo_, 1922. _First six books published by Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York; the others by Doubleday, Page & Company, New York._ CHAPTER XXV DOROTHY CANFIELD FISHER Mrs. Fisher is, we think, the only novelist of whose work we shall say nothing. Why? Because it “speaks for itself”? Certainly not. Every one’s work does that. No, because it does not speak sufficiently for her.