My dear friend:
For two reasons, very strong and very precise, it is my wish to
inscribe your name at the head of these pages. First, that you may know
how dear your name is to me. Second,--and I say it with a tranquil
pride,--because you will like this book. And you will like it, in spite
of all its faults, because it is a book free from hypocrisy, because
it portrays life, life as you and I understand it. I have always in my
mind's eye, my dear Huret, many of the faces, so strangely human, which
you have arrayed in procession in a long series of social and literary
studies. They haunt me. It is because no one better than you, and more
profoundly than you, has felt, when surveying these human masqueraders,
how sad and how comical a thing it is to be a man. May you find again
in these pages that sadness which makes lofty souls laugh, that
comicality which makes them weep.