“Oh, I don’t know. I suppose it would depend. But if you are going back to old-fashioned romance what is the use of describing the heroine? She is always the same. Wait a moment.”
She picked up a book that lay beside her. It was “Monte Cristo.” I had lent it to her the day before when the train boy had nothing more that she wanted. I had seen her read three novels through in one day. Perhaps there was something malicious in this intrusion of a book that she couldn’t finish in a day. Now she was reading from “Monte Cristo”—
“‘A young and beautiful girl, with hair as black as jet, her eyes as velvety as the gazelles, was leaning with her back against the wainscot, rubbing in her slender fingers, modelled after the antique, a bunch of heath blossoms ...; her arms bare to the elbow, embrowned and resembling those of the Venus at Arles, ... and she tapped the earth with her pliant and well-formed foot.’ There you have it,—that is the formula. And wait—here is the other: ‘A more perfect specimen of manly beauty could scarcely be imagined.’ That is the formula for the hero. Do these delight you?”
“Yes; it is primitive, but I like it. I have enjoyed ‘Monte Cristo’ on this journey even for its faults. It is ultimate romance, and I think I like it much better than the ultimate in realism. I like the heroine to be pretty. Unless the author specifically denies it, I always believe that she is pretty. You see I am hopelessly old-fashioned; and you are hopelessly modern. Probably you don’t care at all how the story comes out.”
“Oh, I am not so modern as that! I do care. What I like about realism is that you aren’t so sure how it will turn out. Doesn’t it always seem to you like a waste of time to make them all so miserable when they are to live happily ever after anyway?”
“It doesn’t seem to me any worse than making them happy with the certainty that they are going to be dismal by and by. I suppose I have a serious limitation somewhere, but I should rather see people painfully happy than amusingly miserable, which seems to be the dilemma in which you insist upon finding us all.”
