Excerpt from The Man Who Understood Women, and Other Stories One Of our most delightful novelists has recently written a preface to a collection of his short stories in which he apologises for dis interring them from magazines and resuscitating them in book form. I think he ought not to have done it. If a preface were needed, it should have been written rather as an appeal, than as a warning. It should have been in the nature Of a bugle-blast. It should have said, in effect Here, my faithful and gentle readers who, owing to the limitations of time and space and the worries Of the world, have missed much of my best and most cherished work - here is an Opportunity of an unexpected feast. I confess that such an appeal would not have been modest - and the author in question is the most modest Of our confraternity - but the assertion would have been true. Now, with the agreeable task before me of writing a preface to another man's collection, I am not bound by any such sense Of modesty, and I should like to make clear once more certain issues which my friend above referred to has, to a certain extent, confused. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.