THE SALAMANDER
Doré
THE
SALAMANDER
By
OWEN JOHNSON
Author of
The Varmint, Stover at Yale
The Sixty-First Second, Etc.
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
EVERETT SHINN
INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
Copyright 1914
The Bobbs-Merrill Company
PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS
BROOKLYN, N. Y.
TO MY WIFE
FOREWORD
Precarious the lot of the author who elects to showhis public what it does not know, but doubly exposed hewho in the indiscreet exploration of customs and mannerspublishes what the public knows but is unwilling toconfess! In the first place incredulity tempers censure,in the second resentment is fanned by the necessity ofself-recognition. For the public is like the defendant inmatrimony, amused and tolerant when unconvinced ofthe justice of a complaint, but fiercely aroused when defendingits errors.
In the present novel I am quite aware that where criticismis most risked is at the hands of those entrenchedmoralists who, while admitting certain truths as fit subjectsfor conversation, aggressively resent the same whensuch truths are published. Many such will believe thatin the following depiction of a curious and new type ofmodern young women, product of changing social forces,profoundly significant of present unrest and prophetic ofstranger developments to come, the author, in depictingsimply what does exist, is holding a brief for what shouldexist.
If the type of young girls here described were anephemeral manifestation or even a detached fragment ofour society, there might be a theoretical justification forthis policy of censure by silence. But the Salamandersare neither irrelevant nor the product of unrelatedforces. The rebellious ideas that sway them are thesame ideas that are profoundly at work in the new generationof women, and while for this present work I havelimited my field, be sure that the young girl of to-day,from the age of eighteen to twenty-five, whether facingthe world alone or peering out at it from the safety ofthe family, whether in the palaces of New York, thehomesteads of New England, the manors of the Southor the throbbing cities and villages of the West, whateverher station or her opportunity, has in her undisciplinedand roving imagination a little touch of the Salamander.
That there exists a type of young girl that heedlesslywill affront every appearance of evil and can yet remaininnocent; that this innocence, never relinquished, can yetbe tumultuously curious and determined on the explorationof the hitherto forbidden sides of life, especiallywhen such reconnoitering is rendered enticing by thepresence of danger—here are two apparent contradictionsdifficult of belief.