[In the excerpt below, the critic admires Page for his traditional values and his protest against vulgarity in Under the Crust.]

[Page] has the American temperament and the American point of view; he believes instinctively in the best things, and he has the courage of a great hope. A Virginian of the Virginians, he has been the secretary and recorder of a form of social life which had the charm of lavish hospitality, of gracious manners, of a generous habit of life, and of a keen sense of personal dignity. Of that old order there are no more charming reports than "Meh Lady" and "Marse Chan," nor are these unaffected and deeply human interpretations of a vanished social order likely to be surpassed in the future. They give one that sense of finality which comes only from those things which are so adequately done that the imagination rests content in them. Mr. Page has written other stories which show the same qualities of insight, sympathy, humor, pathos, easy command of the resources of the short story, but these tales which have become American classics may stand as representative of the finest portraiture of the old-time Virginia gentlefolk and of the relations they held with their family slaves.

The charm of that society lay largely in the absence of the commercial spirit, the emphasis on the arts of social intercourse, the chivalrous feeling for women. It was provincial in interest, content with its own standards, proud of its descent, and somewhat given to self-assertion; but it was brave, generous, gallant, and it did not count the cost when friends or convictions were at stake. No one has realized so clearly in art the latent idealism of this society, touched with a more delicate hand its finer qualities, or entered more sympathetically into its humor than Mr. Page; to the end of the story he will be one of the chief interpreters and recorders of the Old South.

In his later work Mr. Page has made his readers feel in different ways the vigor of this power of indignation, which is a forcible expression of his idealism. To the fine qualities which touched his imagination in the old social order he remains true in his later stories and essays. More than once he has attacked the pretension, waste, and vulgarity of the ultra-fashionable set with unsparing vigor of feeling and speech; in a period of extravagance, display, and moral laxity he has stood resolutely for the old-time and all-time qualities of a real social life—cleanness, refinement, honor, dignity, courage. For the cheap, self-constituted aristocracies of the day, the rank mushroom growths of a prolific soil, he has expressed the wholesome scorn of the man who hates vulgar shams and of the American who feels that the spirit of the country has been grossly caricatured by a horde of vulgarians. It is interesting to note the fact that American novelists have made common cause against these degraders of American standards and traditions; Mr. Howells, Mr. James, Mr. Wister, by portraiture, irony, invective, have stood, as Mr. Page has stood, for the Americanism which is not vulgarized by wealth nor perverted by leisure.

In the seven stories which make up the volume of short tales, Under the Crust, the discerning reader will find the characteristic idealism of Mr. Page expressing itself in delicate and sympathetic studies of men and women to whom commercialism exists only to be resisted, and who live in the world as if life were still a matter of the spirit and not a matter of physical luxury. "Miss Godwin's Inheritance" is a charming study of the supremacy of sentiment in a woman's heart, and in delicacy of perception and sensitiveness to the more elusive qualities of character is quite on a level with Mr. Page's best work. The portrait of an idealist in "A Brother to Diogenes" is in another and broader style, and gains in effectiveness by reason of the vastness and solitude of its background; while "My Friend the Doctor" is a personal study in a beautiful kind of altruism rather than a piece of fiction. It would be a mistake, however, to convey the impression that Mr. Page draws only the men and women who live by the heart; the vigor with which he can sketch an elemental man is strikingly shown in the dramatic study of "A Goth." The stories in this volume are not of equal excellence, but it contains work which Mr. Page has never surpassed.