CONTENTS
It would be ungracious to let this book go out into a preoccupied world without some word of gratitude to those who have written regarding the young Henry as he has appeared from month to month in a magazine. The letters have been the kindliest and most stimulating imaginable; and have surprised me, for I have never found it easy to picture Henry as a popular hero of fiction.
He isn't, of course, a hero at all. His weaknesses are too plain—the little evidences of vanity in him, his selfcentred moments, his errant susceptibilities—and heroes can't have weaknesses. And heroes—in any well-regulated pattern-story—must 'turn out well.' Henry, in this book, doesn't really turn out at all. His success in Episode X is a rather alarming accident. I think he'll do well enough, when he's forty or so. At twenty, no. He has huge doses of life's medicine yet to swallow. And all his problems are complicated by the touch of genius that is in him.
Another thing: there couldn't have been a Mamie Wilcox in our pattern-story. And certainly not a Corinne. Hardly even a Martha. For a 'divided love interest' destroys your pattern. Yet Marthas, Corinnes, Mamies occur everywhere. So I can't very well apologise for their presence here.
We might, of course, have had Henry overthrow the Old Cinch in Sunbury; clean up the town. But he didn't happen to be a St George that summer. And then, so many heroes of pattern-stories, these two decades, have slain municipal dragons!
He might have listened in a deeper humility to the worldly wisdom of Uncle Arthur. But he didn't. He had to live his own life, not Uncle Arthur's. His way was the harder, but he couldn't help that.
I would have liked to pursue further the Mildred-Humphrey romance; including Arthur V. and the curious triangle that resulted; but the crisis didn't come in that year.
And against the temptation to dwell with Madame Watt and her husband I have had, here, to set my face. Though something of that sto