You are asked here and now to think of her not as a novelist but as a woman. For as a novelist we could say of her only the obvious fact, that she is a top-notcher judged by any and every standard. The woman who could write _The Squirrel-Cage_ does not need any critical tests applied to determine the worth and genuineness of her work, nor the sincerity of it. What she does need, or rather, what her readers and all readers need, is a reminder of her rôle as teacher, helper, friend. She is one of those fine people whose work makes the plain word “service” a shining and symbolic thing. “Service” is no longer a word but a ritual and a liturgy. We shall give an outline of her life but as the friend who prepared it for us says in a letter enclosing it: “It does not do justice to her very useful war work.” This letter further says, with simple truth: “She has been one who has not broken down under the strain but has gone on doing a prodigious amount of work. First running, almost entirely alone, the work for soldiers blinded in battle, editing a magazine for them, running the presses, often with her own hands, getting books written for them; all the time looking out for refugees and personal cases that came under her attention; caring for children from the evacuated portions of France, organizing work for them; then she dropped all that and ran the camp on the edge of the war zone where her husband was stationed to train the young ambulance workers; and while there she started any number of important things--reading rooms, etc. Then she went back to her work in Paris. Just now she is at the base of the Pyrenees, organizing a Red Cross hospital for children from the evacuated portions. “All this is reflected, or I should say the result of her experiences is reflected in her _Home Fires in France_, just published this fall. It is just what the title says, and I don’t know anything that has been written anything like it. There isn’t any bursting shrapnel in it, no heroics or medals of honor; it is merely full of the French women and some Americans who have done the steady, quiet work of holding life together until the war should be over. Steadily they try to reconstruct what the Germans have destroyed.... It is the best thing she has done.” It and the deeds back of it. When you read _Home Fires in France_ you will understand why one man who read proof on it exclaimed: “If every one knew this book as I know it there would be no doubt of it selling 100,000 copies at once.” With _The Squirrel-Cage_, published in 1912, Mrs. Fisher became a novelist. It was followed by two books on child training, _A Montessori Mother_ (1913) and _Mothers and Children_ (1914), and then the teacher resumed the rôle of storyteller with _The Bent Twig_. Before _The Squirrel-Cage_ Mrs. Fisher was merely the author of a few textbooks. After it she was an important figure in American fiction.