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FLAMING YOUTH

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Flaming Youth

WARNER FABIAN

BONI AND LIVERIGHT
Publishers       New York

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Copyright 1922-1923,
By BONI & LIVERIGHT, Inc.

Printed in the United States of America

First Printing, January, 1923
Second Printing, February, 1923
Third Printing, February, 1923
Fourth Printing, March, 1923
Fifth Printing, March, 1923

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A WORD FROM THE WRITER TO THE READER:

"Those who know will not tell; those who tell do not know."

The old saying applies to woman in to-day's literature. Women writerswhen they write of women, evade and conceal and palliate. Ancestralreticences, sex loyalties, dissuade the pen.

Men writers when they write of women, do so without comprehension.Men understand women only as women choose to have them, with oneexception, the family physician. He knows. He sees through the bodyto the soul. But he may not tell what he sees. Professional honourbinds him. Only through the unaccustomed medium of fiction and out ofthe vatic incense-cloud of pseudonymity may he speak the truth. Beinga physician, I must conceal my identity, and, not less securely, theidentity of those whom I picture.

There is no such suburb as Dorrisdale ... and there are a score ofDorrisdales. There is no such family as the Fentrisses ... and thereare a thousand Fentriss families. For the delineation which I havestriven to present, honestly and unreservedly, of the twentieth centurywoman of the luxury-class I beg only the indulgence permissible to aneophyte's pen. I have no other apologia to offer.

To the woman of the period thus set forth, restless, seductive, greedy,discontented, craving sensation, unrestrained, a little morbid, morethan a little selfish, intelligent, uneducated, sybaritic, followingblind instincts and perverse fancies, slack of mind as she is trim ofbody, neurotic and vigorous, a worshipper of tinsel gods at perfumedaltars, fit mate for the hurried, reckless and cynical man of the age,predestined mother of—what manner of being?: To Her I dedicate thisstudy of herself.

W. F.

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