novels have made their way and are being read among multitudes of others.  No one buys or reads a book under compulsion; and if any one thinks that the poorer the book the better the chance of its being read by the American people, let him try the experiment.  When a critic condemns my books, I accept that as his judgment; when another critic and scores of men and women, the peers of the first in cultivation and intelligence, commend the books, I do not charge them with gratuitous lying.  My one aim has become to do my work conscientiously and leave the final verdict to time and the public.  I wish no other estimate than a correct one; and when the public indicate that they have had enough of Roe, I shall neither whine nor write.

As a rule, I certainly stumble on my stories, as well as stumble through them perhaps.  Some incident or unexpected impulse is the beginning of their existence.  One October day I was walking on a country road, and a chestnut burr lay in my path.  I said to myself, “There is a book in that burr, if I could get it out.”  With little volition on my part, the story “Opening a Chestnut Burr” took form and was written.

One summer evening, when in New York, I went up to Thomas’s Garden, near Central Park, to hear the delicious music he was educating us to appreciate.  At a certain point in the programme I noticed that the next piece would be Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and I glanced around with a sort of congratulatory impulse, as much as to say, “Now we shall have a treat.”  My attention was immediately arrested and fixed by a young girl who, with the gentleman escorting her, was sitting near by.  My first impression of her face was one of marvellous beauty, followed by a sense of dissatisfaction.  Such was my distance that I could not annoy her by furtive observation; and I soon discovered that she would regard a stare as a tribute.  Why was it that her face was so beautiful, yet so displeasing?  Each feature analyzed seemed perfection, yet the general effect was a mocking, ill-kept promise.  The truth was soon apparent.  The expression was not evil, but frivolous, silly, unredeemed by any genuine womanly grace.  She giggled and flirted through the sublime symphony, till in exasperation I went out into the promenade under the open sky.  In less than an hour I had my story “A Face Illumined.”  I imagined an artist seeing what I had seen and feeling a stronger vexation in the wounding of his beauty loving nature; that he learned during the evening that the girl was a relative of a close friend, and that a sojourn at a summer hotel on the Hudson was in prospect.  On his return home he conceives the idea of painting the girl’s features and giving them a harmonious expression.  Then the fancy takes him that the girl is a modern Undine and has not yet received her woman’s soul.  The story relates his effort to beautify, illumine the face itself by evoking a mind.  I never learned who was the actual girl with the features of an angel and the face of a fool.