This will seem a hard saying to most of us, who are trained to try to get at the kernel of everything. All modern education is designed to teach men and women to think and express themselves abstractly with ease and freedom and surety. Why? Because since the Greeks certain abstractions and abstract thought and expression generally have been prized as the best and safest and handiest medium of intellectual exchanges. They are the intellectual coinage--a kind of verbal money that obviates the clumsy old methods of barter. But while we are all used to money and would not do without it we have to remember that the majority of mankind still carries on a vast amount of intellectual exchange by barter. You tell me an actual incident or a story you have heard and I tell you what I have experienced or heard. We “swap” experiences and knowledge and each benefits by what he gets from the other without so much as drawing a single abstract conclusion or generalization. The method has its disadvantages but lack of interest is not one of them! Understand this and you understand Mrs. Burnett. She is dealing with you as you would deal with your neighbor. You would not go to your neighbor and say: “It is possible to live too long.” You would go and tell him: “John Smith’s mother isn’t treated decently. Yesterday,” etc., and you would relate the actual occurrence. He would nod. And he would tell you something in exchange. And neither of you would generalize about your respective narrations, but each of you would take the lesson in them well to heart. That is the way of the world and of neighbors. It is Mrs. Burnett’s easily comprehended way too. When she leaves Plandome Mrs. Burnett consents to spend a few days in noisome New York--you can buy things there, after all, and editors and publishers there do congregate--and then she flees to Bermuda. But not until the last cosmos of autumn has perished and gone and every flowerbed at Plandome has been “tucked in a blanket of fertilizer.” In Bermuda she--gardens. She imports, in times more favorable than the present, countless roses from England. Her Bermuda cottage is unpretentious but charming. To revert for a moment to _The Shuttle_, we may note something almost prescient in what Mrs. Burnett said, in 1907, about England and America, in a letter respecting this novel. She somewhat regretted the characterization of the book as “a novel of international marriage.” That, she argued, was hardly her theme. Of course not. She has no abstract themes. She wrote: “The subject (of international marriage) is an enormous one, and if I had written all I have been observing for years and all I should have liked to write I should have made a three-volume novel.