SOURCE: “Current Fiction.” The Nation 97, no. 2528 (11 December 1913): 563–64.

In the following review of Here Are Ladies, the critic considers the volume to be a masculine work free of pretensions.

Mr. Stephens is a poet, and so declared himself by issuing two volumes of verse before. With The Crock of Gold he showed mastery of humorous and imaginative prose. That was an unusual book, and the critic could only vaguely range it with Alice in Wonderland and The Water Babies—which is to say, very much above and beyond books merely conventional or merely clever. Here Are Ladies is almost as unusual. The short papers here collected are not quite stories—certainly not “short stories” in the American sense. They are “sketches” rather, scenes and situations presented on their own merits, as Maupassant, for example, often thought them worth presenting. These sketches arrange themselves for the most part in triads...