If Alice Duer Miller would only express herself with a lofty obscurity she would be a Distinguished Author and if she would only write about a different kind of people she would be a really popular novelist. Not that she isn’t popular, but that she might be ten times more so; and not that her work lacks distinction, but it lacks the peculiar kind of distinction which our high critical minds rave about. She can go deeply--and deftly--into the minds of her people and bring out with a beautiful lucidity and no little humor what she finds there. But this satisfies neither camp. With those who are dissatisfied because Mrs. Miller does not write “artistically” (that is, unintelligibly) about the thoughts and emotions of her characters--with those we have no patience. But the others, the readers who think this excellent writer wasting her time on a worthless lot of subjects, for these we feel a good deal of sympathy. _Ladies Must Live_ is full of clever conversation; so is _The Happiest Time of Their Lives_. Clever conversation never sold 10,000 copies of a book nor had the slightest effect on a single life except the deplorable effect of temporarily causing unequipped readers to simulate a cleverness beyond their powers. Moreover, the young reader of such books as these is pretty likely to think the people in them half-admirable because they say adroit things--or say things adroitly. This makes the young reader more difficult to deal with than ever. Mrs. Miller, or some one for her, will be retorting that she cannot take too-impressionable young minds into account in constructing a story. To which only a single answer is possible and it is this: Everybody else in the world has to take the young into account; why should not a writer do so? Mrs. Miller’s books, then, should be read by no one under thirty. And this not because the reading of them will actually harm a younger person, but because it may make him or her insufferable company for the immediate future. It is quite impossible to think of Mrs. Miller’s ingenious tales of persons in “society” as harming anybody; they are too low voltage for that. And indeed in _The Happiest Time of Their Lives_ we meet pleasant and positive, or “plus” persons, such as Pete Wayne and his mother, the contemplation of whom would be safe for the most immature sixteen-year-old. But it would be very, very unsafe to set before some young women the splendidly delineated Mrs. Vincent Farron of that same book! Just because her husband knew perfectly how to deal with her, how to break her, it does not follow that thousands of decent, affectionate, kind (and rather muddle-headed) young men can fill successfully the rôle of tigress tamers!