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Dear Sherwood: The third novel is spinning along. I have just finished the ninth chapter, totaling so far about 20,000 words. It is becoming absorbing to me though as you said I have tackled a job. The underlying philosophy is the play of woman's instinct against man's logic. For this purpose I posed a little country girl from Iowa against the manager of a knit underwear factory in Wisconsin. Both are naive, unsophisticated, giving full play for the obvious impulses in the love affair. Eve Watson is getting to be a nice character. It is a modern story, psychological, analytical, with the industry only as an incidental background. I am going to make an effort to market it -- and for this reason am pushing it as as fast as I can.

The second story the old Minneapolis druggist and his fairy stories. I think is in the hands of Brandt Brand. A man in New York who knows Edna Kenton (I had met her in the old South Side days, but I doubt that she remembers me) this man was to undertake to get her to read it -- but I haven't heard whether she has read it or not. I had Macmillan turned it down with this criticism "The book starts off as one thing and ends as another. It ceases to be a novel and becomes a series of throwbacks, and there was not sufficient substance in the fairy tales. In other words the book began solidly and ends but ended too vaguely"