C.N. & A.M. Williamson

From NYT review (Sep 21 1919): Page 1 finds Roger Sands en route to New York from the Coast. As the train starts, a beautiful woman bursts into his stateroom with a breathless plea that he let her occupy it as far as Chicago, and also that he take care of an envelope of documents for her. She tells him that more than one life depends upon her retention of these documents, and that she is afraid they will be stolen from her. She says she will never be able to explain the situation and appeals to Sands to trust her. In Chicago the lady is not met by the friend she expected there. Sands, who has fallen in love with her, marries her on the spot. Later he repents of this headlong step. His first misgivings come when his wife brings unwelcome notoriety upon herself by impulsively taking into their home a girl who attempts suicide by hurling herself from the window of a store in which she works. The rest of the plot revolves around the fatal, mysterious papers "the girl from nowhere" gave Sands on the train, and around a costly pearl necklace he gave her after making her his wife. Both papers and pearls are stolen by a desperate gang of crooks. From the time of the thefts the story resolves itself into a fictional equivalent of the game of "Needle! Needle! Who's got the Needle?"

Note: Do not trust this bizarrely wrong ebook description appearing on the Apple Books, NOOK Books, and several library sites: "This title and its animal characters made it popular among young readers in Williamson's day and remains suitable for all ages today." Whaaat?

(from inner flap of Doubleday dj) Elizabeth, the Princess de Miramare, beautiful, high-born, and of a bewitching personality, a member of the most brilliant society, outwardly prosperous, lived the secretly hard life of those who have to make very short ends meet.

Two courses were open to her -- one to resort to a distant and odious cousin; the other to use her charm and position to help others (for a consideration) in their social and heart struggles. She decides upon the latter. Her cases are all exciting, some dangerous, and the most unexpected and disconcerting element in each is the intervention of the distant cousin.

Elizabeth's own romance is the fitting climax of the story.

[from The San Francisco Call Jul 27 1907]

Of course, there is an automobile or two in this latest story of the Williamsons; we should not be able to accept it as genuine otherwise, but it is not an automobile story. Rather, it is a Zenda romance.

This tale is all about the emperor of the little country of Rhaetia and the Princess Virginia.

The princess is a marvelously beautiful girl, daughter of a poverty-stricken princeling and has some royal blood in her veins. The authors have given their princess a surprising pedigree.

"She's half German: on her father's side a cousin not too distant of William II," they put it. "She's half English; on her mother's side related to the king through the line of the Stuarts. And in her there's a dash of American blood which comes from a famous grandmother, who was descended from George Washington, a man as proud and with the right to be proud as a king."

A cursory investigation of the history of the Washington family would have saved the Williamsons from this ridiculous error. Washington was the father of his country, to be sure, but -- they should have selected some other famous American family name for "Virginia."

The princess is a romantic girl. She has made an ideal of Leopold the emperor, and when an offer is made for her hand, she is almost overwhelmed, but only momentarily. She refuses a crown because she wants the emperor's love for herself alone. She is not flattered by an offer which she knows imports no more than a desire upon the part of the emperor to seat a respectable Protestant princess on his throne.

She and her mother set out incognito for the emperor's domain to woo the kingly suitor. She is determined to make him willing to sacrifice his kingdom for her before she tells him the truth about her birth.

To reveal more would spoil the pleasure of reading the story. Adventures abound and complication follows complication till it seems to be well nigh impossible to extricate the poor little princess from her dilemma. The plot is ingenious and cleverly holds the interest. The denouement is satisfactory. It will prove a delightful bit of reading for a summer day.