The editors' introduction sets a deliberate frame: courtships become "quaint" not by design but when circumstance forces love to "zigzag to a fortunate close past juts and angles of individuality." The ten stories gathered here, originally published in Harper's Novelettes (1906), test that premise by placing lovers in situations where character, not convention, dictates the route. In Margaret Deland's "An Encore," a seventy-year-old man with a "shock of grizzled red hair" pursues romance in a town that equates romanticism with putting on airs. Elsewhere, a suitor must argue his case before a "Highland sphinx" who weighs denominational fitness alongside farming skill. The collection treats courtship as a stage for the odd and unexpected, where the lovers themselves would prefer a smoother path.

The Weight of Community Judgment

Several stories position courtship as a public performance subject to local scrutiny. In "An Encore," Old Chester's moral code—where being romantic is "just one shade less reprehensible than to put on airs"—hovers over Captain Price's late-life pursuit. The narrator reports this as collective opinion, not individual malice, making the town itself a character. Similarly, the excerpt from the Highland story shows a suitor named Timmins pleading his case before Janet's elder, who delivers judgment "in a cloud of tobacco smoke" with the finality of a "Gaelic Rhadamanthus." The elder's objections are not personal but categorical: Janet should not marry an Englishman when "good Scotchmen" are available. Community standards—moral, national, even denominational—become obstacles the lovers must navigate, often with more ingenuity than passion.

Dialect and the Texture of Argument

The stories make extensive use of regional speech to mark character and conflict. In the Highland excerpt, the elder's Scots—"Weel—ye canna ha' her"—contrasts with Timmins's plainer English, underscoring the cultural divide between them. Their debate over Methodism's place in heaven turns on precise phrasing: the elder concedes some Methodists may be in heaven, but he is "no so sure o' their whereaboots." Timmins's riposte—"In 'eaven there's neither marriage nor givin' in marriage"—shifts the ground from theology to eschatology. The dialogue is not mere color; it carries the story's argumentative weight. Janet, meanwhile, says nothing, her reactions conveyed through gesture—leaning on her hoe, drooping to her work—as the men talk over and around her. The editors' introduction notes that American courtships tend toward a "type, very simple, very normal," but these stories deliberately seek the idiosyncratic, and dialect is one means of achieving it.

Delayed Courtships and Unconventional Timetables

Several stories feature protagonists past the usual age of courtship. Captain Price is seventy; Janet is "three-an'-forty," which the elder dismisses as young, citing Christy McDonald who married at fifty. The title "An Encore" suggests a second performance, a romance that comes after life's expected script has ended. The editors' introduction frames this as part of the collection's interest: courtships become quaint when they deviate from the "matter-of-course" path most people follow. The stories do not treat these late romances as pathetic or absurd; instead, they give the characters dignity through their persistence. Timmins, though stolid, possesses "a certain slow pugnacity" that keeps him arguing long after the elder has dismissed him. The collection as a whole suggests that love's timing is less important than the character it reveals, and that the most interesting courtships are those that refuse to conform to expectation.

Readers will find that the stories reward attention to the small, telling detail—a gesture, a dialect phrase, a piece of local custom—more than to plot mechanics. The editors have selected tales that foreground the friction between individual desire and social expectation, and the best of them let that friction generate both humor and pathos. Approach the collection as a series of character studies in which courtship serves as the occasion, not the subject, and the quaintness lies less in the lovers than in the world they must negotiate.