A Rebellious Heroine

Transcribed from the 1896 Harper and Brothers edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
A Story
BY JOHN KENDRICK BANGS
ILLUSTRATED BY W. T. SMEDLEY
NEW YORK HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 1896
Copyright, 1896, by Harper & Brothers.
All rights reserved .
TO A H. B.
“— if a word could save me , and that word were not the Truth , nay , if it did but swerve a hair’s-breadth from the Truth , I would not say it !” —Longfellow.
Stuart Harley, despite his authorship of many novels, still considered himself a realist. He affected to say that he did not write his books; that he merely transcribed them from life as he saw it, and he insisted always that he saw life as it was.
“The mission of the novelist, my dear Professor,” he had once been heard to say at his club, “is not to amuse merely; his work is that of an historian, and he should be quite as careful to write truthfully as is the historian. How is the future to know what manner of lives we nineteenth century people have lived unless our novelists tell the truth?”
“Possibly the historians will tell them,” observed the Professor of Mathematics. “Historians sometimes do tell us interesting things.”