Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/241



Mr. Tarkington has written another of his nice novels.

The reference in it to the time when Saratoga was the place to see the social world recalls naturally enough the "passing" of the Saratoga trunk. It is not the least of Mr. Tarkington's titles to our gratitude that he was himself a pioneer of the change—that he was among the first to feel the convenience and pleasure of travelling light, of carrying all one's belongings in a hand bag. If one eliminates top hats, frock coats, starched shirts, woolen underwear, hoops and whalebone-and-steel contraptions, it is astonishing how many essential things of fine smooth texture one can pack into a hand bag or into a bead purse or even pull through the circle of a wedding ring. None of our novelists is fonder of travelling light than Mr. Tarkington; and yet he is always nicely, even "niftily," garbed. He steadily succeeds in being our best-dressed novelist; and he has been that so long that, quite unlike the begoniaed dandies of a later generation, he never calls the slightest attention to his dress.