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    THE SALAMANDER




    [Illustration: Dore]




    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 show his public what it
does not know, but doubly exposed he who in the indiscreet exploration
of customs and manners publishes what the public knows but is unwilling
to confess! In the first place incredulity tempers censure, in the
second resentment is fanned by the necessity of self-recognition. For
the public is like the defendant in matrimony, amused and tolerant when
unconvinced of the justice of a complaint, but fiercely aroused when
defending its errors.

In the present novel I am quite aware that where criticism is most
risked is at the hands of those entrenched moralists who, while
admitting certain truths as fit subjects for conversation, aggressively
resent the same when such truths are published. Many such will believe
that in the following depiction of a curious and new type of modern
young women, product of changing social forces, profoundly significant
of present unrest and prophetic of stranger developments to come, the
author, in depicting simply what does exist, is holding a brief for what
should exist.

If the type of young girls here described were an ephemeral
manifestation or even a detached fragment of our society, there might be
a theoretical justification for this policy of censure by silence. But
the Salamanders are neither irrelevant nor the product of unrelated
forces. The rebellious ideas that sway them are the same ideas that are
profoundly at work in the new generation of women, and while for this
present work I have limited my field, be sure that the young girl of
to-day, from the age of eighteen to twenty-five, whether facing the
world alone or peering out at it from the safety of the family, whether
in the palaces of New York, the homesteads of New England, the manors of
the South or the throbbing cities and villages of the West, whatever her
station or her opportunity, has in her undisciplined and roving
imagination a little touch of the Salamander.

That there exists a type of young girl that heedlessly will affront
every appearance of evil and can yet remain innocent; that this
innocence, never relinquished, can yet be tumultuously curious and
determined on the exploration of the hitherto forbidden sides of life,
especially when such reconnoitering is rendered enticing by the presence
of danger--here are two apparent contradictions difficult of belief. Yet
in the case of the Salamander's brother, society finds no such
difficulty--it terms that masculine process, "seeing the world," a study
rather to be recommended for the sake of satisfied future tranquillity.

That the same can be true of the opposite sex, that a young girl without
physical temptation may be urged by a mental curiosity to see life
through whatever windows, that she may feel the same impetuous frenzy of
youth as her brother, the same impulse to sample each new excitement,
and that in this curiosity may be included the safe and the dangerous,
the obvious and the complex, the casual and the strange, that she may
arrogate to herself the right to examine everything, question
everything, peep into everything--tentatively to project herself into
every possibility and after a few years of this frenzy of excited
curiosity can suddenly be translated into a formal and discreet mode of
life--here is an exposition which may well appear incredible on the
printed page. I say on the printed page because few men are there who
will not recognize the justice of the type of Salamander here portrayed.
Only as their experience has been necessarily individual they do not
proceed to the recognition of a general type. They know them well as
accidents in the phantasmagoria of New York but they do not comprehend
them in the least.

The Salamander in the last analysis is a little atom possessed of a
brain, thrown against the great tragic luxury of New York, which has
impelled her to it as the flame the moth.

She comes ro