Cornelia A. P. Comer, accomplished critic, essayist, and writer of short
stories, was educated at Vassar, and afterwards engaged in journalistic
work in the Middle West and California. She now lives in Seattle.
The plot of _The Preliminaries_ might readily be told in a single
paragraph. Its significance lies in its lucid and austere psychology.
The young Mr. Oliver Pickersgill appears in four distinct situations;
and as we watch him in company with the four dominating and diverse
personalities in turn, we are engrossed in the swift and poignant play
of his feelings--feelings which finally deepen into a sincere and
settled consciousness of attained truth and a confident loyalty to an
imprisoned convict. The verisimilitude of both situation and
conversation is complete; and in the process there is no exhaustion of
emotional values. Henry James would not have treated the situations with
more clarity.
The author's further treatment of the problems connected with marriage
is seen in two other noteworthy Atlantic stories--_The Kinzer Portraits
and The Long Inheritance._