The sense of the dramatic cannot be acquired. It must be born in a writer and if he have it he will apply it unfailingly to all possible material that comes his way. Miss Johnston’s possession of this sense is one element of her genius--perhaps the most important. The second element is her creative imagination, equally innate. To have to use terms of this sort is a pity, but let us see just what her “creative imagination” is. If you will turn to her book _The Wanderers_ you will find that it is a series of nineteen chapters, each unrelated to the others except in the underlying theme, the relationship of men and women. This relationship is pictured at various times and places in the world’s history, from the period when the human race knew not the uses of fire to the days of the French Revolution. Now for the earlier chapters of this book there were no historical records to which Miss Johnston could turn for an idea of how men and women lived in those days; she is dealing with ages before recorded history began. No doubt she got what she could out of the scientists, the anthropologists and others who seek for the truth of the human race’s beginnings. But scientific facts, head measurements, skull conformations, ingenious theories based on the cave man’s drawings, are one thing and a picture of life as it was lived tens of thousands of years ago is quite another. How evoke the picture? Well, we can’t tell you _how_ it is done, for if that could be told the manner could be copied and we should many of us be able to write such chapters as open _The Wanderers_. All we can be certain of is this, that Miss Johnston was able to place herself in the surroundings of a primitive woman of the treefolk--so much was the first imaginative step. And having taken this first step she was able to create the moments and hours of that creature’s existence, to imagine her thoughts and her actions with respect to the things about her. That is what we mean by creative imagination. There is a good deal less of it in story-telling than is generally supposed. For the world has no idea of the extent to which novels and tales of all kinds are merely autobiographical, or reminiscent of scenes and persons, emotions and traits, once known. What is recalled is not imagined nor even invented. A person may be lifelike, wonderfully done, convincing, typical, true, and yet not be anything but a patchwork from an actual past. He is neither imagined nor created and a certain amount of re-creation involving only a small amount of imagination, or even none at all, is the only actual contribution of his author.