If some people find no pleasure or benefit in Gene Stratton-Porter’s stories, that is exclusively their own fault. They are looking for certain æsthetic satisfactions in what they read and they require them so absolutely that the writer’s best and the writer’s sincerity cannot compensate for their absence. Is it good to have come to such a state? Every one must make up his own mind about that, even as he must make his own decision whether he will strive to attain it. Everything of this sort is to be had for a price,--if you want to pay so much. “‘To my way of thinking and working the greatest service a piece of fiction can do any reader is to leave him with a higher ideal of life than he had when he began. If in one small degree it shows him where he can be a gentler, saner, cleaner, kindlier man, it is a wonder-working book.’” Thus Gene Stratton-Porter. There is incontestable evidence that her books have done these very things. Literature, we have been told, is “a criticism of life.” How about molding lives? BOOKS BY GENE STRATTON-PORTER _The Song of the Cardinal_, 1903. _Freckles_, 1904. _What I Have Done With Birds_ [_Friends in Feathers_], 1907. _At the Foot of the Rainbow_, 1908. _A Girl of the Limberlost_, 1909. _Birds of the Bible_, 1909. _Music of the Wild_, 1910. _The Harvester_, 1911. _Moths of the Limberlost_, 1912. _Laddie_, 1913. _Michael O’Halloran_, 1915. _Morning Face._ _A Daughter of the Land_, 1918. _Homing with the Birds_, 1920. _Her Father’s Daughter_, 1921. _The Fire Bird_, 1922. _Mrs. Porter’s books are published by Doubleday, Page & Company, New York._ CHAPTER IX ELEANOR H. PORTER In the pleasant old town of Cambridge, Massachusetts, there is a fourth (top floor) apartment and above it a roof garden. Come up on the roof. “Fresh, clean light canvas, framed in by borders of flowers, with a hammock to dream in and a good stout table and a typewriter,” confront us. At the table a little woman, blonde, youthful looking, her light and fluffy hair neatly combed, her blue eyes--“laughing eyes”--changing expression rapidly with her thoughts. She is writing with a lead pencil and when she stops to talk to us she shows a ready wittedness, a conversational gift, an aliveness that are charming--charming! She tells us that she works here every morning when too boisterous winds or a driving storm do not make it impossible; or too low a temperature. She writes novels. It takes her a year to do one and when she has finished she is good for nothing for several days. She writes each book three times; first in lead pencil, the second draft on the typewriter here, “and it is this copy that is polished over and rewritten and tinkered with--and all fixed up.” The third draft has usually few changes. It, or a stenographer’s copy of it, goes to the publisher, and later there comes a message from Houghton Mifflin Company in Boston: “Advance orders for your new novel _Just David_ are 100,000 copies.”