PREFACE
but that also the writer is prepared to do. The normality of the human relations and not the normality of the circumstances is surely the true criterion between novel and romance. I have altered nothing in the story and it is interesting to note how plainly the Great War of 1914-18 loomed already through the haze of coming things.
The sixteen stories that follow "In the Days of the Comet," together with those in Volume I, show the progressive development of a dozen years or more of short-story writing. Most of them are just stories, pure and simple, things written with amusement to amuse. In "The Door in the Wall" and "The Country of the Blind" ideas embody themselves. "The Beautiful Suit" is a later outbreak; it was written one afternoon in 1911; it came into the writer's head exactly as it is set down; it has an air of being profoundly significant and it really means nothing at all. So that is probably as near being a true work of art as anything in this collection.
From 1911 onward except for two in the book called "Boon," I wrote no short stories worth preserving until this volume was in the press. Then one morning in January, 1925, I was moved to write the little fable of "The Pearl of Love” which I have inserted at the end.
