Page:Flaming Youth black on red.pdf/9

 & WORD “Those

FROM

THE

who know

WRITER

TO THE

will not tell; those who

READER: tell do not

know.” The old saying applies to woman in to-day’s literature. Women writers when they write of women, evade and conceal and palliate. Ancestral reticences, sex loyalties, dissuade the pen. Men writers when they write of women, do so without comprehension. Men understand women only as women choose to have them, with one exception, the family physician. He knows. He sees through the body to the soul. But he may not tell what he sees. Professional honour binds him, Only through the unaccustomed medium of fiction and out of the vatic incense-cloud of pseudonymity may he speak the truth. Being a physician, I must conceal my identity, and, not less securely, the identity of those whom I picture. There is no such suburb as Dorrisdale. . . and there are a There is no such fami’;* as the score of Dorrisdales. Fentrisses. . . and there are a thousand Fentriss families. For the delineation which I have striven to present, honestly and unreservedly, of the twentieth century woman of the luxury-class I beg only the indulgence permissible to a neophyte’s pen. I have no other apologia to offer. To the woman of the period thus set forth, restless, seductive, greedy, discontented, craving sensation, unrestrained, a little morbid, more than a little selfish, intelligent, uneducated, sybaritic, following blind instincts and perverse fancies, slack of mind as she is trim of body, neurotic and vigorous, a worshipper of tinsel gods at perfumed altars, fit mate for the hurried, reckless and cynical man of the age, predestined mother of—what manner of being?: To Her I

dedicate this study of herself.

W. ¥.