“After looking at Mr. Willsie’s photographs, I chanced to be walking along Fifth Avenue, and glancing into a bookseller’s windows, I beheld one of those pyramidal displays of a new book which I have sometimes thought must have exhausted the whole edition. The name of the book was _Still Jim_. It was by the lady of Mr. Willsie’s beautiful photographs--and it was a real best seller, said the bookseller, to whom I disbursed the needed dollar and whatever it was. No young writer could hope to live up to Mr. Willsie’s photographs, but I was happily astonished to find how near Mrs. Willsie came to doing it. Apart from the book as a story, its quality of atmosphere, its breath of vast spaces, its sense of heroic action on a great stage, were remarkable. There was, too, that background of ‘character’ to the writing in which the life of a book mainly resides, and for lack of which so many clever books come and go, perishing like the summer skies.
“_Lydia of the Pines_ [we have already quoted Mr. Le Gallienne’s words on _The Heart of the Desert_] combines all Mrs. Willsie’s qualities and characteristics in a maturing ratio. The book shows her as growing nearer and nearer to that symbolic photograph of her. More and more she is seen as the passionate dreamer of the true American ideal, a practical dreamer, too, not afraid to arraign America to her face for wrong done in the past, and wrongs still a-doing. The theme of _Lydia of the Pines_ is one of the noblest she could have chosen--the infamy of political corruption that is so subtly and cruelly doing the last wrong to the Indian by the legalized theft of his pitiful ‘reservations.’
“‘Where the pine-forest is destroyed, the pines never come again,’--such is the burden of this noble and very moving story of a high-souled but most human girl, whose family and friends are implicated in ‘real estate’ deals with Indians of a nearby reservation. It is a simple story too, moving among simple lives, in a simple Western milieu which Mrs. Willsie presents with great fidelity, with many touches of humor and pathos.
“In _Lydia of the Pines_ one sees Mrs. Willsie growing in strength, more surely becoming one of the authentic voices of the nobler Americanism, and her book is sure of a huge welcome by those who have that at heart.”