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grand event Cleona took me aside and, with a little tremble in her voice, said, "I don't know whether to ask it of you or not, Mr. Westlake [it was Mr. Westlake now, which shows something to the initiated], but if you could do it, it would be so good of you."

"I can't think of anything I would n't do for you," I said largely; and meant it, or almost.

"It's about my poems."

Once more I experienced that palpitation of the heart that I had felt when Cleona asked me what issue of the "Temple Magazine" she should expect her first work to appear in. Did she still look forward to the October number?

"Could you arrange to give me back all my manuscripts without publishing them?" she faltered. "Of course I shall

insist on refunding the money."

"Will I?" I shouted, and longed to take her in my arms and dance a wild jig.

"You can do it, then?" she said radiantly, reading the affirmative in my face. "I would do it," I replied, "if the issue were already circulated, and I had to go through the country on foot to buy up the whole edition."

"You dear!" she cried, and I did not dodge.

"But why this change of heart?" I asked her, when I had recovered my poise. "Why don't you want your poems printed?"

"I do want them printed," she replied; "but Hal is such a queer fellow about some things. And of course I would do anything to please him. But he 's queer. You never could guess what he said. He said: 'I would rather my wife would n't be in the public eye at all. I don't want her to write poems for everybody to read.' Is n't that odd of him?"

I explained it to her. Hal sees so many literary people that he gets tired of them. It is a quite natural reaction.

BOOKS WE RE-READ

BY WARREN BARTON BLAKE

MAGINE our predicament if books higher than these preferred ones, we may

IMAGINED Ople, predica, nerving opened

the house to Mr. Wells's "Passionate Friends" and Mr. John Masefield's rhymed novels about roughs, we were forever obliged to spend our afternoons with Lady Mary and her humanitarian adulterer, and our evenings with bruisers and ditch-diggers and boozers out of the Bye Street! That is the beauty of the book: you and you alone decide. "No, Plato,' you say firmly; "I'm not feeling philosophical to-night. I much prefer Conan Doyle." And when one's mind is for some reason on a higher plane, one sends Brigadier Gerard and Sherlock Holmes packing without one moment's embarrassment at the fact that their creator is a baronet, and invites in Goethe or Molière or Erasmus.

What is it that gives to some of these book friends a power to fascinate us the second time or the third, while others, some of them works we place academically

keep on our shelves for half a century without once blowing the dust off their gold edges? Take that trifle of Xavier de Maistre's, the "Voyage autour de ma chambre." He had done something naughty-I do not care to remember just what-and was "confined to his room" in a sense more literal than the usual one; and to pass the time he described, in a travel style that nothing outside of Stevenson can rival, the contents of that little apartment. Short as the book is, I have never re-read it in serious fashion cover to cover; but again and again I have tasted a few pages, and always it puts me in good humor. Much of Stevenson is improved by this second reading, and some of Barrie. Some of Galsworthy, too.

Jane Austen is another of the authors. who wears well. The classic appreciation of Jane Austen-classic partly because it means so much more, coming from the author of the totally different "Waverley

Novels"-is Walter Scott's journal entry lights in her or, like Emerson and J. H. for March 14, 1826:

Read again, for the third time at least, Miss Austen's finely written novel of "Pride and Prejudice." That young lady has a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The big Bow-Wow strain I can do myself like any one now going, but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me.

This is handsomely spoken. And it is the feeling lesser men than Sir Walter must have in returning to "Pride and Prejudice." The other day I took the novel up after neglecting it for seven long years, and the charm was, if anything, stronger than at the last reading. Is there anything in literature more restful than Jane Austen's stories? Certainly this quality of theirs is not wholly due to the sense we have of the final and definitely ordered society which they reflect; and they have never impressed me as being restful by reason of dullness. Dullness is very far from restful to any one fairly widely read, and therefore fairly hard to please.

Despite homely passages that are undeniably wanting in action (in "Emma," for instance), I do not feel the temptation to skip that I succumb to in renewing acquaintance with Sir Walter. Religion without spirituality, duty without enthusiasm, affection without the heat of passion, virtue without a grimace-all that is what one finds in this country-side annalist. Yet one enjoys her as one enjoys a glass of mild ale and a seat in an inn after an all-afternoon walk in some English country-side, or a place by the fire and a cup of hot tea with an understanding woman to pour it (clever, but not too clever) after a day spent in crowded

streets.

True, these similes are unworthy. Jane Austen is Jane Austen. One either de

Lewes and Charlotte Brontë, one just does n't. But if once you do delight, you do not get tired of her repetitions of plot and characteristics. You do not get tired, either, of your own occasional re-readings. John Ruskin was a good deal of a fool, especially when he asked some one, presumably his reader, "Will you go and gossip with your housemaid or your stableboy when you may talk with kings and queens?" The correct answer is YES. It is not wholesome to live too much with royalty; the fare is too rich for the untitled stomach. Moreover, you often learn more by talking with the stable-boy than by interviewing the college professor.

That is,

But I am, alas! no nearer than before to determining what is the secret of the books eternally young, what the secret of their power of endlessly pleasing and stimulating us. Other books that we are compelled to set high in any rank-list of literature are for once only. Charm, that indefinable gift of style and spirit, counts for much; but that is not all. A certain serenity of temper, an economy of passion and gesticulation, counts for much. In welcoming Anatole France to England not many months ago, Thomas Hardy commented upon the fact that M. France maintains even in his lighter works "the emphasis of understatement." after all, a great part of the secret. Nowadays there is more stylishness in the magazines than style. We will never reread the "stylish" novels and poems the authors of which seem endlessly to bawl at us at the top of their lungs. As in conversation the most persuasive talker is not he who is most urgently shrill, so in this matter of companionable volumes-volumes always welcome as table-books, armchair books, pillow-books-it is those whose authors command backgrounds and middle-distances as well as vivid foregrounds, painters whose palettes command cool whites (like Chardin's) as well as burning tints of sunset and fire, that we love unendingly, and from which we draw refreshment and repose.

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SUN

SOCIAL SUN-SPOTS

BY CHARLES WIMLEY

PICTURE BY NOEMI PERNESSIN

UNBURN stenciling is now the reigning fad of Newport. It started in this way: Mrs. Harry Fitz-Carrington, the well-known society leader, appeared at a tennis-match one afternoon in an elegant bodice of Porto Rican drawn-work. That evening at a dance her décolletée gown revealed a charming pattern of lines and squares, stenciled in pink upon the snowwhite of her neck. It was ravishing. She was the object of the admiration of every man present.

Next morning the linen shops of Newport were ransacked for stencil designs, rosettes, arabesques, geometric figures, flowers, birds, -anything that would make an attractive red-print. The telegraph wires to New York were kept busy with orders for new and wonderful patterns.

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Women of artistic talent canceled their bridge engagements to sketch original subjects. Those who were less gifted sent far and wide for book-plate designers and other skilled draftsmen. Meanwhile they went about thickly veiled and parasoled, carefully avoiding the sun except when they needed it for their red-printing, which process was accomplished by means of scientific time exposures, with the advice of able photographers.

The next dance was a glory of pink and white. New steps and colored wigs lost their attraction before the fascination of the stenciling. Every woman was a work of art.

But the crowning affair of the early season was the "Tattoo Ball" given by Mrs. Tidley-Cholmondeley. At this brilliant

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