Mrs. Comstock always goes to the scene of her stories. Her backgrounds are always of actual places and her people are frequently real people. Thus in _Joyce of the North Woods_ her St. Ange is a place in northern New York and all the lesser characters are taken from life. In _The Vindication_, Dr. Hill is straight out of actuality. On a suffrage tour Mrs. Comstock met this young physician whose work had been so largely among the Adirondack poor. He, too, had adopted a backward and neglected child, just as Dr. Hill takes hold of the boy Chester in Mrs. Comstock’s novel. _A Son of the Hills_ was the fruit of a visit in the Virginia mountains. Not the immediate fruit; some time had to elapse before Mrs. Comstock could “see” the story in the mountaineers. In _Mam’selle Jo_, Mrs. Comstock has gone up North again, to the St. Lawrence country, and she tells the moving story of a woman of 40 who has at last struggled clear of debt and is at last able to gratify the instinct of mother-love which is in her. Popular she is, but she does not think of popularity. In truth a writer cannot. For, as Mrs. Comstock says, the writer who thinks of the possible popularity of her work when she should be thinking of her story will impair her work. And her work is the thing with Mrs. Comstock. Reject it if you like, accept it if you will; she will go unshakeably on. She has something to do and is about doing it. BOOKS BY HARRIET T. COMSTOCK _Janet of the Dunes_, 1908. _Joyce of the North Woods_, 1911. _A Son of the Hills_, 1913. _The Place Beyond the Winds_, 1914. _The Vindication_, 1917. _Mam’selle Jo: A Novel of the St. Lawrence Country_, 1918. _Unbroken Lines_, 1919. _The Shield of Silence_, 1921. _At the Crossroads_, 1922. _(Also many books for boys and girls.)_ _Mrs. Comstock’s earlier books are to be had in reprint. Janet of the Dunes was published by Little, Brown & Company, Boston; the others are published by Doubleday, Page & Company, New York._ CHAPTER XXXI HONORÉ WILLSIE Nothing is so satisfactory to write about as a novelist with ideas; but in writing about Mrs. Honoré Willsie we shall not discuss her ideas. It will be enough to try faithfully to set them before her thousands of readers and the thousands who ought to be her readers, to try to picture Mrs. Willsie herself. That is all that can be done in a chapter of reasonable length. To discuss intelligently Mrs. Willsie’s ideas would require a book and an amount of exact knowledge on certain subjects--immigration and Americanization, for example--that is no part of our reporter’s equipment. A straightaway bit of exposition must do instead.