*OLD WIVES FOR NEW*
Many, many critics have called this novel immoral and gross. It is not
so. It tells the naked truth--not brutally, but frankly. It is not
romance. It is real life. It deals with a wife who cannot keep pace
with her husband, and who becomes slothful and unclean and low-minded
because she does not realize that to live and move forward she must keep
herself physically and mentally clean and fresh. It is the truth. It
hits many a woman to-day hard. Women do not like this truth. It bites
too deep and so they called it disgusting and immoral. And yet more than
200,000 people have read it. Of this novel it is said: "If the husband
reads it he gives it to his wife. If the wife reads it first, she is
very likely to hide it from her husband." A woman said of it: "While I
was reading it, I stopped one night just after the train wreck. It was
so vivid that as I took up my morning paper, the next day, I glanced at
the head-lines for news of Murdock's condition, and to find whether the
scandal had come out." "Old Wives for New" is a picture of married
life--when the blinds are drawn and the servants out of the way, and the
husband and wife become their real selves. The _St. Paul Pioneer Press_
says: "It contains things about women that have never seen the light of
day before." It might have added: and things about men also. The book
teems with good characters, each with a haunting resemblance to
ourselves. There are women of respectability and women of the other
world, wise men and fools, people that are more good than bad, people
that are more bad than good, but nobody that is unhuman enough to be
either all good or all bad. The keynote is that of a good story which
searches for the truth.