To write a modern society story that will be worth while is no easy task; for here an author readily descends to banalities, and the class itself is hardly acceptable to the serious critic. Yet stories of this kind are so popular and form (I am sorry to say) so large a part of the reading of our young women--and our young men, too, for that matter--that the type surely has come to stay for sometime and must be taken account of. To make your story commendable, then, you will need to be original and striking in your choice of situation and to write with a succinctness and verve that will animate even the commonplace. Be careful not to be sentimental. If you touch on love, do so with dignity--with either clean, pure humor, or unaffected seriousness. Try hard to save your hero from being a cad. The namby-pamby, third-generation-millionaire protagonist, if not altogether uninteresting, is surely exasperating to a sensible reader. By playful imitation, you might write a good satire on this class of story. If you do so, you will need to be familiar with one or more of the popular examples in order to use them specifically. Or you might try your hand at a pastoral, just for the history of the thing. If you care to adhere to certain elements of the genre, you could put together under this guise allegorical scenes in which the present lords of the earth figure as weak or lusty shepherds piping a tune to the watch-dogs of war, the sheep of commerce, and the Goddess of Getting-On. If you wish to be more than half serious, you can find countenance in a number of our most recent light stories that undoubtedly turn toward the pastoral. This type, too, will give you a chance at a mixture of prose and verse. Here you can put in some of those fetching sylvan lyrics that you must have composed long before now and have always been afraid to mention. =The Fur Coat= Translated by Mrs. J. M. Lancaster. Copyright, 1903, by The Current Literature Publishing Company. Reprinted by permission. _Prof. Max Wiegand to Dr. Gustav Strauch_ BERLIN, November 20.