Miss Cooke’s _The Clutch of Circumstance_, on the other hand, is just a good mystery yarn about secret service work and international plots--but based on fact. It has a serious defect in that the heroine, some of whose qualities are plainly exhibited for the reader’s admiration, is guilty of atrocious treachery, becoming, in fact, a German spy!
Miss Cooke? She is going ahead, thank you! She is going ahead in the wisest way in the world for a person of her special gifts. What was said in _The Threshold_ about Joan is the best thing to say about her author: “The world is thrust forward by such dynamic personalities as yours, even by your mistakes. There is danger in action, but more in tranquil inaction, in feeble acquiescence in the face of injustice and wrong.”
I have left untouched this chapter, written in Miss Cooke’s lifetime, because, for the readers of her books, the picture of her as she lived is the picture to remember; and for the time they are under the spell of one of her stories, the fact is without significance that, in April, 1920, while in Japan at the commencement of a world tour, Marjorie Benton Cooke died.
_Modern Monologues_, 1903. _Dramatic Episodes_, 1905. _Plays for Children_, 1905. _More Modern Monologues_, 1907. _The Girl Who Lived in the Woods_, 1910. _Dr. David_, 1911. _Bambi_, 1914. _The Dual Alliance_, 1915. _Cinderella Jane_, 1917. _The Threshold_, 1918. _The Clutch of Circumstance_, 1918. _The Cricket_, 1919. _Married?_ 1921.
_The Girl Who Lived in the Woods and Dr. David are published by A. C. McClurg & Company, Chicago; Miss Cooke’s later novels are published by Doubleday, Page & Company, New York; but The Clutch of Circumstance is published by George H. Doran Company, New York._
Why do some of Grace S. Richmond’s books sell faster than the books of any other American woman writer? Because they do! And their popularity has no relation whatever to their size. Some of the littlest--_On Christmas Day in the Morning_, _On Christmas Day in the Evening_, and _The Enlisting Wife_, for instances--sell most rapidly. Not the size; perhaps it has something to do with the substance!
No perhaps about it! Mrs. Richmond has, more perfectly than most of her contemporaries, the gift for disclosing the simplest and deepest feelings of men and women everywhere in just those words which are at the back of our heads and hardly ever on our lips. They are the words we ache to utter but never quite bring ourselves to say. She says them for us. She makes articulate and perfect the full feeling that is in us. She is our emotional self--that part of self which is a common possession--touched with pentecostal fire. When we read her we have the delight of self-expression blended with a feeling of gratefulness to her for affording it to us.