“Judith Taine, who was married to Lieutenant Kirke Wendell, Junior, just before he sailed for France, is keeping in a small blue book a little record which he may see when he returns. It begins with the last paragraph of a letter from her young husband.
“‘If you hadn’t enlisted with me, my Judith, I shouldn’t be half the man I’m beginning to hope I am, over here in France. If manhood means standing up straight and strong, facing the future without the old boyish love of ease and snug corners--then--well--time will prove me, anyhow. Darling, can you guess how you are with me, every waking moment--and some of the sleeping ones too, when I’m lucky? My wife--even though I could be with her only those few hours after Father married us--how absolutely she is that! My enlisting wife, my fighting comrade!--_O Judith!_’
“I don’t cry often--not I, Judith Taine Wendell. I can’t afford to cry, there’s too much to be done. But that last paragraph did bring the tears--happy ones--and I kissed the dear words again and again before I tucked the letter away in the warm place where each one lives, day and night, till the next one comes. O Kirke! Even you don’t know yet how ‘absolutely’ I am your wife!”
Such writing is insusceptible of analysis; it admits only of characterization. We all know how hostile some of the characterization is likely to be, but the fact remains that Mrs. Richmond has contrived perfectly to set down _not_ the things the Judith Wendells and Kirke Wendells actually say and write but the unspoken thought that gives body and coloring to their actual words. It is what we wish we could say and write that Mrs. Richmond gives us. She transliterates the true feeling. Remember, it is not our feeling but the depth of it that we are habitually ashamed to show. It is only necessary to make that reflection to understand Mrs. Richmond’s success. She is as popular with our emotional selves as would be a person who should write letters for the unfortunate inhabitants of an illiterate community. Most of us are emotional illiterates and are likely to remain so. We need Mrs. Richmond and more like her.
_The Indifference of Juliet_, 1905. _With Juliet in England_, 1907. _Round the Corner in Gay Street_, 1908. _Red Pepper Burns_, 1910. _Strawberry Acres_, 1911. _Mrs. Red Pepper_, 1913. _The Second Violin_, 1906. _A Court of Inquiry_, 1909. _On Christmas Day in the Morning_, 1908. _On Christmas Day in the Evening_, 1910. _The Twenty-fourth of June_, 1914. _Under the Country Sky._ _Under the Christmas Stars._ _The Brown Study._ _Red Pepper’s Patients_, 1917. _The Whistling Mother_, 1917. _The Enlisting Wife_, 1918. _Brotherly House._ _Red and Black_, 1919. _Foursquare_, 1922.