It is the very question Mary Johnston herself has been asking these twenty years, ever since _Prisoners of Hope_ announced to the world the advent of a new American writer, a woman, to whom it would be necessary to pay respectful attention, to whom it would be wise to give that special admiration reserved for the artist regardless of sex or nativity. Everybody really does belong in a book, especially Mary Johnston in a book upon American women novelists! Prepare, then, for a discursive chapter. Prepare to consider literary genius. Miss Johnston has something, or several things, which no amount of analysis can entirely label and no consideration of circumstances wholly account for. She is the most dramatic of American women writers. Do you remember the ending of the first chapter of _To Have and To Hold_? A shipload of maidens, “fair and chaste, but meanly born,” has arrived at Jamestown, Virginia, in the early days of that settlement. A friend traveling by has told Ralph Percy about it and counseled him to go to town and get him a wife. Percy rejects the idea, but his friend passing on he finds himself alone and lonely in a cheerless house. He tries to read Master Shakespeare’s plays and cannot. Idly he begins dicing. His mind goes back to the English manorhouse that had been his home. “To-morrow would be my thirty-sixth birthday. All the numbers that I cast were high. ‘If I throw ambs-ace,’ I said, with a smile for my own caprice, ‘curse me if I do not take Rolfe’s advice!’ “I shook the box and clapped it down upon the table, then lifted it, and stared with a lengthening face at what it had hidden; which done, I diced no more, but put out my lights and went soberly to bed.” Still more dramatic because it makes a greater demand upon the reader’s imagination, requiring him to picture for himself the ceaseless self-torture of a murderer, is the ending of _Lewis Rand_. Rand has killed Ludwell Cary and has not been found out. At length he walks into the sheriff’s office. When the news gets abroad “the boy who minded the sheriff’s door found himself a hero, and the words treasured that fell from his tongue.” The last words of the book are as follows: “‘Fairfax Cary [brother of the slain man] was in the court room yesterday when he [Rand] was committed. He [Fairfax Cary] and Lewis Rand spoke to each other, but no one heard what they said.’ “The boy came to the front again. ‘I didn’t hear much that morning before Mr. Garrett [the sheriff] sent me away, but I heard why he [Rand] gave himself up. I thought it wasn’t much of a reason----’ “The crowd pressed closer, ‘What was it, Michael, what was it?’ “‘It sounds foolish,’ answered the boy, ‘but I’ve got it right. He said he must have sleep.’” The funeral of Stonewall Jackson in the last pages of _The Long Roll_: