The Lost Key: An International Episode

Excerpt from The Lost Key: An International Episode A novelist must not moralise, except indirectly; and my business has been to paint on a small canvas, with a few colours, some Of the Shifting scenes that pass on a little corner of the world's surface. There, as in a Microcosm, I have tried to Show a few Of the elements which are still seething and struggling for mastery - the Old and new leaven, which the Twentieth Century may possibly fuse into one. SO far as the portraiture is exact, it is of things, not persons: in these pages there is no photograph of any individual, inasmuch as I profess to write a story, and not a record Of contemporary scandal.