I had come but a few years before from the South Seas; I was full of what I had seen and felt; I was eager to write of it all, and I did write of it; but the thing which was deeper still in me was the life which 'Pierre and His People', 'The Seats of the Mighty', 'The Trail of the Sword', 'The Lane That Had no Turning', and 'The Right of Way' portrayed.

That life was destined to give me an assured place and public, while 'Mrs.Falchion', and the South Sea stories published in various journals before the time of its production, and indeed anterior to the writing of the Pierre series, only assured me attention.
Happily for the book, which has faults of construction, superficialities as to incident, and with some crudity of plot, it was, in the main, a study of character.

There was focus, there was illumination in the book, to what degree I will not try to say; and the attempt to fasten the mind of the reader upon the central figure, and to present that central figure in many aspects, safeguarded the narrative from the charge of being a mere novel of adventure, or, as one writer called it, "an impudent melodrama, which has its own fascinations." Reading Mrs.Falchion again after all these years, I seem to realise in it an attempt to combine the objective and subjective methods of treatment--to combine analysis of character and motive with arresting episode.

It is a difficult thing to do, as I have found.

It was not done on my part wholly by design, but rather by instinct, and I imagine that this tendency has run through all my works.