But the end came overnight; and suddenly the whole face of the world was transformed. The reaction in the normal person was intense. In an instant war books of several pronounced types became intolerable reading. _How I Reacted to the War_, by Quintus Quintuple seemed tremendously unimportant. Even _Mr. Britling_ was, momentarily, utterly stale and out of date. Reminiscences of the German ex-Kaiser were neither interesting nor important; he was a fugitive in Holland. The book reporter who had any sense of news values grasped this immediately. Books that a month earlier would have been worth 1,000 to 1,500 word articles were worth a few lines or no space at all. On the other hand books which had a historical value and a place as interesting public records, such as _Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story_, were not diminished either in interest or in importance. Some books which had been inconsequential were correspondingly exalted by the unprecedented turn of affairs. These were books on such subjects as the re-education of disabled fighters, the principles which might underlie the formation of a league of nations, problems of reconstruction of every sort. They had been worth, some of them, very small articles a week earlier; now they were worth a column or two apiece. 19 No doubt we ought to conclude this possibly tedious essay with some observations on the one per cent. of books which call for swift surgery. But such an enterprise is, if not impossible, extraordinarily difficult for the reason that the same operation is never called for twice. In a sense it is like cutting diamonds, or splitting a large stone into smaller stones. The problem varies each time. The cutter respects certain principles and follows a careful technique. That is all. We shall, for the sake of the curious, take an actual instance. In 1918 there was published a novel called _Foes_ by Mary Johnston, an American novelist of an endowment so decided as fairly to entitle her to the designation “a genius.” Miss Johnston’s first novel had appeared twenty years earlier. Her first four books--nay, her first two, the second being _To Have and to Hold_--placed her firmly in the front rank of living romantic writers. The thing that distinguished her romanticism was its sense of drama in human affairs and human destiny. Added to this was a command of live, nervous, highly poetic prose. History--romance; it did not matter. She could set either movingly before you. Her work showed steady progress, reaching a sustained culmination in her two Civil War novels, _The Long Roll_ and _Cease Firing_. She experimented a little, as in her poetic drama of the French Revolution, _The Goddess of Reason_, and in _The Fortunes of Garin_, a tapestry of mediæval France. _The Wanderers_ was a more decided venture, but a perfectly successful. Then came _Foes_.