lative meaning of all the books in which Miss Cather has sought to record the quest of her generation for true romance, for the real thing, for that which enables one to forget everything else, for that which uses and consumes one adequately.
Miss Cather came out of a Western small town by way of the University of Nebraska some twenty or twenty-five years ago. From that statement alone one can infer, with small probability of error, that she had a good intelligent mother of "Puritan" upbringing; that her father was something of a pioneer, and that Miss Cather's early education was of what we call a New Englandish cast, qualified by a Western environment and contacts with German, Swedish and Bohemian settlers on the prairies.
When the University of Nebraska had done its best to kindle her curiosity and to open her mind, I infer that she came East with literature and music in her heart, and eagerly continued her education in Greenwich Village, in Paris, in London, and in many other places at home and abroad.
For nearly twenty years I have fondly preserved a second-hand impression of her before she was a famous novelist. It was sketched for me by a college friend of mine, Harry James Smith, who was killed in war service. Many years ago, as a beginner in letters he used to give me delightful gossip about the young people who were in those days sharpening their pens for literary adventure in New York. In my old memories young Miss Cather is sitting every morning on a bench in Washington Square, reading Whitman's "Leaves of Grass." I believe she repudiates this reminiscence as imaginary. But I am sure that she has sat in Washington Square and that she has read "Leaves
