The Preliminaries, and Other Stories

Oliver Pickersgill expects love and a comfortable family background to smooth the path to marriage. Ruth Lannithorne asks something harder of him: respect for her father, who is serving a prison term for embezzlement. Her mother then questions Oliver about his savings, earning power and readiness to support a household. These awkward interviews open Cornelia A. P. Comer's collection of three stories, published in 1912, with a close look at the distance between youthful confidence and adult responsibility.

Marriage and family ties also shape the collection's concerns beyond that opening courtship. Desire recalls a hotel fire in Reno and the conversation that follows when Mrs. Marshall gives her shelter. Their different attitudes toward money, taste and marriage emerge through the details of a shared room. Readers interested in domestic fiction will find social judgments tested through personal encounters, with dialogue carrying much of the argument.