“As a boy, of course, I adored the American Indian of Fenimore Cooper, but, since then, words fail. If I have a bête noire in fiction, nowadays, it is the American Indian. I mention this purely personal peculiarity, merely to emphasize the delight which I took in Mrs. Willsie’s hero in _The Heart of the Desert_--and his truly heroic wooing and winning of a white girl, with Mrs. Willsie’s, and, I am sure, all her readers’ concurrence. Never was such a masterful wooing, or one brought to winning through such heart-beating suspense, such a grim passionate race for love and life in so wild and star-lit and infinite a setting.” And he says that therefore “when I say that, in my opinion, _The Heart of the Desert_ is one of the best ‘yarns,’ and, if I may say so, one of the most virile love stories written in our time, it is not from any prejudice in favor of its subject matter.” Mr. Le Gallienne’s article is not long. We take the liberty to quote the rest of it from a booklet on Mrs. Willsie prepared by the Frederick A. Stokes Company, her publishers. This booklet also contains an interesting article by Hildegarde Hawthorne on Mrs. Willsie and her novels. Says Mr. Le Gallienne: “My first acquaintance with Mrs. Honoré Willsie’s books came through a photograph of her looks. The photograph, or photographs, to which I have reference occurred in a copy of _Harper’s Weekly_, not so very long before that honored periodical was gathered to its fathers. They were taken by her husband, and represented Mrs. Willsie in the heart of the Arizona Desert; dizzily seated at the edge of a canyon; in camp democratically at dinner, with a stunning hat and a still more stunning smile, and so on. Here, one said, was the veritable ‘Girl of the Golden West,’ tall and fearless-eyed as Artemis; something like a symbolic figure of that noble type of Western woman, which accounts so largely for the proverbial chivalry--and homicides--of that portion of America which is at once most romantic and most real. One of these, particularly, haunted me, and with my subsequent acquaintance with Mrs. Willsie’s writings in mind, I must be forgiven one more use of the word ‘symbolic’--Mrs. Willsie is seated in the foreground, a wilderness of sagebrush all about her, and a lonely stretch of barren mountain in the near background. Her head, of which you only see the massive coiled hair, is bent in an attitude, as of sorrow, close over her knees, from which her right hand hangs listlessly, almost touching the cowboy hat at her feet. ‘The close of a long day,’ is the caption of the picture. In the light of Mrs. Willsie’s books, that photograph has come to me to represent the attitude of her soul, the soul of a young American woman, to whom the idealism that made her country is a religion, in one of those moods of dejection which occasionally overcome all of us who love this great Republic, at what too frequently seems like an eclipse, or even a decadence, of that idealism.