[In the following review of Here Are Ladies, the critic considers the volume to be a masculine work free of pretensions.]

Mr. Stephens is a poet, and so declared himself by issuing two volumes of verse before. With The Crock of Gold he showed mastery of humorous and imaginative prose. That was an unusual book, and the critic could only vaguely range it with Alice in Wonderland and The Water Babies—which is to say, very much above and beyond books merely conventional or merely clever. Here Are Ladies is almost as unusual. The short papers here collected are not quite stories—certainly not “short stories” in the American sense. They are “sketches” rather, scenes and situations presented on their own merits, as Maupassant, for example, often thought them worth presenting. These sketches arrange themselves for the most part in triads, as “Three Heavy Husbands,” “Three Women Who Wept,” “Three Happy Places,” and so on. In most of them Mr. Stephens plays with the perennial subjects of romancer and satirist, women and marriage. But his play is mirthful, seldom merely facetious, and never merely bitter; his humor is that of a poet masking as a satirist. Taken by themselves, some of these pages, like certain episodes in The Crock of Gold, may shock “the gentle reader,” but their extravagance is (to compare small things with great) that of Rabelais rather than that of Swift. A deep vein of romantic feeling underlies all this display of cynicism, and crops up in the intercalary verses which offer so sharp a contrast, on the surface, to the prose text.

Mr. Stephens deals with types rather than persons. For example, the first of his “heavy husbands” is the silent man. Having thoughtlessly exposed himself to matrimony, he looks forward to the wedding ceremony as the beginning of a lifetime of conversation:

It lay, therefore, that he must amend his own hand, and, accordingly, for the purpose of marital intercourse, he began a sad inquiry into the nature of things. The world was so full of things; clouds and winds and sewing-machines, kings and brigands, hats and heads, flower-pots, jam and public-houses—surely one must find a little to chat about at any moment if one were not ambitiously particular.

But the dread moment arrives and he finds himself dumb:

As he sat in the train beside his wife the silence which he so dreaded came upon them. Emptiness buzzed in his head. He sought diligently for something to speak about—the characteristics of objects! There were objects and to spare, but he could not say—“that window is square, it is made of glass,” or, “the roof of this carriage is flat, it is made of wood.”

Suddenly his wife buried her face in her muff, and her shoulders were convulsed. …

Love and contrition possessed him on the instant. He eased his husky throat, and the dreaded, interminable conversation began—“What are you crying for, my dear?” said he.

Her voice, smothered by the fur, replied: “I am not crying, darling,” said she; “I am only laughing.”

Perhaps the real charm and strength of the book lie in the fact that it is a man's book; a book free of the drawingroom conventions, decent or indecent, which now obsess our fiction; a book with the free and hearty voice of one honest man speaking to another in his shop or at his club.