PREFACE
This book deals with the adventures of a man and his wife and his sister-in-law who move to New York from a small middle western city. Because the writer and she who jokingly married him moved to New York from the middle west, and because the writer has almost as many sister-in-laws as Solomon, several Nordic blondes have inquired whether the hero and heroines of the book are not actually us. Fortunately most of the inquirers made the inquiry of me, the possessor of a notoriously sweet disposition. Two of them, however, asked the madam herself and were both shot down.
In the first place, the ladies of the book are supposed to have inherited enough money to make them and the gent more or less independent. Nothing like that in our family.
In the second place, the sister-in-law of the book has a hard time getting a man. The sister-in-laws in real life acquired permanent men while still in their nonage, you might say, and didn’t have to move out of the middle west to do it. And though none of them, perhaps, can be said to have done as well as the madam herself, at least from an æsthetic standpoint, still it is something to boast of that none of them was obliged to go Democratic.
The contents of “The Big Town” were written mostly in a furnished house in Greenwich, Connecticut, and the author wishes to thank the rats for staying out of the room while he worked. It was winter time and the furnished house was a summer cottage, but we didn’t realize that when we rented it. Nor, apparently, did the rats.
R. W. L.
March, 1925.