Bravo! A simple, straightforward and unstudied rejoinder, that! And if the critic says that he is only asking for “both realities” let us demand of him why he praised the “artistry” of those dark Russian novels of muck and insanity--and nothing else. He must condemn them for their worse one-sidedness ere we listen to another word from him. Moreover, we have, we must confess, whatever our personal tastes in fiction, always enough and too many of the specialists in gloom; never quite enough of the purveyors of cheerfulness. You may feel a possibly irrational prejudice against the child that cheers, as Pollyanna or David, but if you do not find absorbing the situation in a “grown-up” novel like _The Road to Understanding_ it is your fault, not Eleanor Porter’s. Here is the son of a very rich man who has always had his way and so takes it headlong in the matter of marrying his aunt’s nursegirl. She is not fitted to make him happy. They are separated--never mind how. The husband thinks of it as a “vacation” for his wife and the baby girl and has no idea that the breach may be semi-permanent. The wife makes it so. She goes to a friend of her husband and begs him to enable her to become in education, in tastes, in deportment fit to be Burke Denby’s wife. And she persuades him to it. Her whereabouts, the whereabouts of herself and Burke Denby’s little daughter, is so simply and effectually concealed, that the husband never gets trace of them. What Helen Denby has set out to do is rather impossible as regards herself, she acknowledges that; but with the passage of years and constant association with well-bred people she does very largely acquire the things she lacked. Yes, years! It is an idea and it is certainly a situation. This is no place to give away a denouement but--they are brought together again. An idea just as ingenious is the foundation of Mrs. Porter’s amusing _Oh, Money! Money!_ It is the attempt of Mr. Stanley G. Fulton, possessor of twenty millions of dollars, to find out how some of his heirs will spend money after he is dead. They are three distant cousins and each of them receives a trustee’s check for $100,000. Then plain John Smith appears among them and watches results. He also learns a thing or two and finds a wife in a woman of middle age (or more) whose humorous wisdom is aptly summed up by her remark that “if you don’t know how to get happiness out of five dollars, you won’t know how to get it out of five thousand. For it isn’t the money that does things; it’s the man behind the money.” Sell? Of course books like this sell! You don’t have to be a psychologist to grasp and subscribe to the six reasons for a big sale, advanced by the publishers just before the publication of _Oh, Money! Money!_--six reasons whose validity has been sufficiently proved as these lines are being written, with proofs piling up hour by hour. Here they are: