The note of democracy is sounded, as a sequence, in the subject matter.  East Side Italian and Jew brush shoulders in Miss Spadoni’s tales; Englishman, Dane, and South Sea Islander shake hands on the same page of W. Somerset Maugham’s “The Trembling of a Leaf”; Norwegian, Frenchman, and Spaniard are among us, as before; Bercovici’s gypsies from the Roumanian Danube, now collected in “Ghitza,” flash colourful and foreign from the Dobrudja Mountains and the Black Sea.  In one remarkable piece of melodrama, “Rra Boloi,” by the Englishman Crosbie Garstin (Adventure), and the African witch doctor of the Chwene Kopjes enters short-story literature.

The Oriental had been exploited to what appeared the ultimate; but continued interest in the Eastern problem brings tidal waves of Japanese and Chinese stories.  Disarmament Conferences may or may not effect the ideal envisioned by the Victorian, a time “when the war drums throb no longer, and the battle-flags are furled in the Parliament of Man”; but the short story follows the gleam, merely by virtue of authorship and by reflecting the peoples of the earth.

When Lee Foster Hartman created his Chinese hero in “The Poppies of Wu Fong,” dramatized Oriental inscrutability with Occidental suavity and sureness, and set off the Oriental gentleman in American surroundings, he brought together the nations in a new vision of the brotherhood of man.  This story was preferred, for the reasons implied, by Frances Gilchrist Wood, who sees in Wu Fong’s garden the subtle urge of acres of flowers, asleep under the stars, pitted against the greed of profiteers; who sees in answer to Western fume and fret the wisdom of Confucius, “Come out and see my poppies.”  The story was rejected by other members who, while applauding the author’s motivation of character, his theme, and his general treatment, yet felt a lack of emotion and a faltering at the dramatic climax.

Wilbur Daniel Steele’s “The Marriage in Kairwan” presents an appalling tragedy which, if it be typical, may befall any Tunisian lady who elects for herself man’s standard of morality—­for himself.  Such a story is possible when the seeing eye and the understanding heart of an American grasps the situation in Kairwan and through the technician’s art develops it, transforms it, and bears it into the fourth dimension of literature.  The thread of narrative runs thinly, perhaps, through the stiffly embroidered fabric, heavy as cloth of gold; the end may be discerned too soon.  But who can fail of being shocked at the actual denouement?  The story may be, as Ethel Watts Mumford admits, caviar.  “But if so,” she adds, “it is Beluga Imperial.”