The problem before me, as I saw in the first ?ash, was this: I had to deal with a subject of which the dramatic climax, or rather the anti-climax, occurs a generation later than the first acts of the tragedy. This enforced lapse of time would seem to anyone persuaded — as I have always been — that every sub jcet (in the novelist's sense of the term) implicitly contains its own form and dimensions, to mark Ethan Frome as the subject for a novel. But I never thought this for a moment, for I had felt, at the same time, that the theme of my tale was not one on which many variations could be played. It must be treated as starkly and summarily as life had ai ways presented itself to my protagonists; any at tempt to elaborate and complicate their sentiments would necessarily have falsified the whole. They were, in truth, these figures, my granite outcroppings but half-emerged from the soil, and scarcely more articulate.