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Gabriella’s philosophy was summed up in her words: “I want to be happy. I have a right to be happy, and it depends on myself. No life is so hard that you can’t make it easier by the way you take it.” In the face of disaster which would have broken the hearts of many women, she won her success, her happiness, from the cruelties of life.

“I believe,” Miss Glasgow once said, “that a person gets out of life just what he puts into it—or rather he puts in more than he gets out, I suppose; for he is always working for something unattainable; always groping vaguely with his spirit to find the hidden things. Gabriella, as you may remember, was ‘obliged to believe in something or die.’”

We have heard Miss Glasgow tell how she lives with a character. She is, or was, living with the character which will become the central figure in the third novel of her probable trilogy. “The time is not ripe to write,” she said, when last speaking about this possible book. “As soon as I begin to speak of the character it all leaves me. For some years I wrote one book every two years. Three years elapsed between Virginia and Life and Gabriella. I have no idea when the next will be finished. I cannot understand how any one can finish and publish two books a year regularly. It seems that one ought to give more of one’s self to a book than that. For my own part, I should like to write each novel and keep it ten years before I publish it. But my friends tell me, ‘Of course, that is impossible. You change so much in ten years—all would be different. You would be obliged to write it all over again.’ I suppose that is true.”