AN IMPORTANT AMERICAN NOVEL
By H. A. MITCHELL KEAYS
Author of "The Road to Damascus," "He That Eateth Bread With Me," etc.
$1.35 net; by mail, $1.48
In her new book, which is by far her most important, Mrs. Keays discusses her favorite theme—marriage. She lays the scene of her story in a modern university city which many readers will recognize, and she portrays the life there with an unsparing, but just, understanding. As usual, she develops her characters with unerring skill. In fact, she depicts all her people, both admirable and otherwise, so naturally, so truly, indeed so perfectly, that the delighted reader will be inclined to believe that she writes of real living, breathing, human beings, existing in the flesh in the shadow of a great American university.
The story centers around Adela Cleave, a charming woman who, after a brief marriage and an early widowhood, has won a considerable reputation as an artist in Paris. Returning to her native land to be with her father, an old and honored professor, she is at first inclined to wonder whether life will offer in her new environment so wide a scope for her interest in humanity as had been offered to her delighted senses in Paris. But she early discovers that almost without her knowing it her life is seemingly inextricably entangled with the lives of a homogeneous yet strangely diverse social structure. Her father, "Daddy Mark," as she calls him, or Professor Kay, as he is known to his colleagues, is a most lovable character, and it is many years since we have had in fiction so keenly diverting a person as Mrs. Heming, Adela Cleave's aunt, and a woman with an infinite capacity for martyrdom. The interplay of interests in a university community is alertly realized in the development of the absorbing plot, which shows the gradual growth of as sweet, and tender a love-story as has been told by any American novelist.
SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY
Publishers, Boston
