James Stephens brought a fresh and distinctive element into the new Irish literature, an imaginative exuberance that expresses itself in an extravagance of wit, loveliness, and picturesqueness. His writings reveal a prodigality of humor, intuition, and searching thought—and something else, which is even rarer, a deep sense of democracy, a sense of the spiritual equality of all men and women.

"Mary, Mary," is one of his best and most delightful stories. The scene is the gray-colored, friendly capital of Dublin, the Dublin of the simple-hearted Dubliner, with its great gray clouds and its poising sea-birds, with its hills and its bay, with its streets that everyone would avoid and with its other streets that everyone promenades; with its greens and its park and its river-walks—the always-friendly Dublin, as seen through the understanding eyes of James Stephens.