A third volume will present his pleasing senility. The
whole is known as a trilogy. If the chief character is of
the other sex we are dragged through her dreamy girlhood, or
hoydenish. We see her in her graduation white, in her
bridal finery. By the time she is twenty we know her better
than her mother ever will, and are infinitely more bored by
her.

Yet who would exchange one page in the life of the boy,
David Copperfield, for whole chapters dealing with Trotwood
Copperfield, the man? Who would relinquish the button-
bursting Peggotty for the saintly Agnes? And that other
David--he of the slingshot; one could not love him so well
in his psalm-singing days had one not known him first as
the gallant, dauntless vanquisher of giants. As for Becky
Sharp, with her treachery, her cruelty, her vindicativeness,
perhaps we could better have understood and forgiven her had
we known her lonely and neglected childhood, with the
drunken artist father and her mother, the French opera girl.

With which modest preamble you are asked to be patient with
Miss Fanny Brandeis, aged thirteen. Not only must you
suffer Fanny, but Fanny's mother as well, without whom there
could be no understanding Fanny. For that matter, we
shouldn't wonder if Mrs. Brandeis were to turn out the
heroine in the end. She is that kind of person.



FANNY HERSELF