Just what this instinct is can’t so easily be answered. Without doubt the greatest part of it is the instinct of paternity. Into the physiological aspects of the subject we shall not enter, though they are supported by a considerable body of evidence. The longing to father--or mother--certain fictitious characters is not often to be denied. Sometimes the story as a story, as an entity, is the beloved child of its author. Did not Dickens father Little Nell? How, do you suppose, Barrie has thought of himself in relation to some of his youngsters? Any one who has read _Lore of Proserpine_ not only believes in fairies but understands the soul of Maurice Hewlett. The relation of the creator of a story to his persons is not necessarily parental. It is always intensely human. O. Henry was variously a Big Brother (before the Big Brothers had been thought of), a father, an uncle, a friend, a distant cousin, a mere acquaintance, a sworn enemy of his people. It has to be so. For the writer lives among the people he creates. The cap of Fortunatus makes him invisible to them but he is always there--not to interfere with them nor to shape their destinies but to watch them come together or fly apart, to hear what they say, to guess what they think (from what they say and from the way they behave), to worry over them, applaud them, frown; but forever as a recorder. 3 None of the author’s troubles must appear in the finished record. Still wearing Fortunatus’s cap he is required to be as invisible to the reader as to the people he describes. There are exceptions to this rule. Dickens was the most notable. Many readers prefer to have a tale told them by a narrator frankly prejudiced in favor of some of the characters and against others. Many--but not a majority. In the best novel that Booth Tarkington has so far written, _The Flirt_, the dominating figure is a heartless young woman to whom the reader continuously itches to administer prussic acid in a fatal dose. But Mr. Tarkington does not scald Cora Madison with boiling invective nor blister her with hot irony. He relates her doings in the main almost dispassionately; and set forth thus nakedly they are more damnable than any amount of sound and fury could make them appear to be. Mr. Tarkington does not wave the prussic acid bottle, though here and there, distilled through his narrative and perceptible more in the things he selects to tell about than in his manner of telling them, the reader is conscious of a faint odor of almond blossoms, signifying that the author has uncorked the acid bottle--perhaps that his restraint in not emptying it may be the more emphasized.