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“And realism is only the truth of life told, and is the writer’s true business. Hawthorne was strongly realistic. He did not try to be pleasing or pleasant. He wrote things as he saw them.

“I must live with a character a long time. Then the desire to write comes and I begin after that to shape the background, and the details of plot weave into their proper places. I never force myself to begin a piece of work nor force myself to keep at it, when the something within stops. And I never get an idea by looking for one. They just come, always unexpectedly and always at the most inopportune times and places—at a reception, on the train, on the street.”

When Miss Glasgow says that she does not let a problem get into her novels, she means that she does not put it there, or consciously put it there. She selects her people, who have their individual problems as she concedes, and brings them into relation with each other and from that relation a problem may arise, probably does. But that is a natural and artistic procedure, the perfect antithesis of the propagandist’s methods. Once to Montrose J. Moses Miss Glasgow talked rather freely about novel writing and her literary ideals.