Before starting Faint Perfume (1923), her third and in some ways her best novel explicitly written as realism, she published three minor pieces more interesting for what they imply than for their literary excellence. The first was an inconsequential one-act play for the Ladies' Home Journal. Entitled Uncle Jimmy (1922), it resurrected for a brief moment the buried Calliope Marsh and her Friendship Village neighbors. That this play should have followed Miss Lulu Bett is evidence that Zona Gale's break from Friendship Village sunshine never conclusively occurred. The second piece was the serial Man at Red Barns, published in The Delineator. Reflecting Zona Gale's growing interest in religious New Thought movements, the novelette's protagonist is John Hazen, a recently widowed Universalist minister who believes that all churches should become one. By preaching universal love, supposedly more deeply infused than any creed, Hazen hopes to eliminate the "stupid duplication or...