Indeed, one shares the author’s delight in the quaint and the marvelous, the instructive and the curious, and gladly wanders with her into any of the bypaths she chooses to explore.
Thus the displeasure which many felt upon reading in The Professor’s House the chapters dealing with Tom’s discovery of the pueblo, chapters fascinating in themselves but certainly intrusive in a novel of situation, must be wholly absent from this new book. Since she is concerned with the life histories of Father Latour and of his intrepid vicar, Father Vaillant, rather than with their destinies as determined by circumstance and situation, she may with perfect propriety and with entire charm indulge herself in character sketches for their own sake, in the recital of miracles and of saints’ legends, and in the exposition of historical incidents. It is a chronicle, a piece of historical narrative, a biography, a sketch, a tale and it quite justly affords her all those rights and privileges which the construction of the novel is bound to deny. From the outset Miss Cather makes it clear that her book is not a novel.
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