OWEN CAREY
Carey wrote for her with a simplicity of expression that was sweetly reasonable and altogether charming—a style that conveyed romance to the public taste, without effort, through a soda-fountain straw. He found that she had identified herself with his heroine; so he fed her up, curatively, in the person of that heroine, with the loyalty and devotion of adoring heroes; and never had the feminine reader found a happier appeal to her pride of sex. And yet the heroine was a Shakespearian woman—a true masculine ideal—brave, wise, witty, self-sacrificing, chaste, and proudly faithful to her lord; and love's young dreamers fairly drooled over her. The girl was interested in every detail of the Elizabethan life in Stratford-on-Avon, and Carey made it vivid, with the help of the Astor Library, if he did not try to make it real. It glowed with the light that never was. The whole story had the "uplift" that is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things unseen. It was a school-girl's dream. It came to the publishers in her handwriting, and started the first report that "Owen Carey" was a woman. And when Carey called at the publishers' office, in response to a letter of acceptance, they were as astonished as if Marie Corelli had turned out to be G. K. Chesterton.
He had grown plump on the girl's cooking. She kept his clothes pressed and brushed and mended. She had made him buy a new gray suit for the oc-
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