“I am like one of those lawyers who delight in saying, ‘We don’t admit anything, Your Honor.’”
“Maybe you are a lawyer,” I interposed, “and are a heroine because you refused a magnificent retainer for reasons of conscience?”
But she shook her head again. “I was going to say,” she went on, “that romance simply is too sentimental for me. What you would call the monotonous dead level isn’t so stupid as the antirealism critics like to make out. Take the present entirely commonplace incident. I meet you on a railway train. For my soul’s good, you feed me with romance, and exhibit a most entertaining curiosity. Now all that isn’t stupid, is it?”
“Thanks, gentle lady.”
“Then why may we not like in a book the sort of thing we enjoy in life?”
“But I should insist that all this is romance. You are a heroine, and if I am not a hero, I am playing leading man just now, which has great possibilities. We are being hurled through space at a speed of sixty miles an hour. By and by a dark-skinned person will loom at the door and say that dinner is ready in the dining car, and you will let me open all the doors for you to the third coach ahead; and we will eat, drink, and be merry at the parting of the ways, and you will twit me for my New York accent in the most musical dialect that ever was invented by the Anglo-Saxon race. Yet I do not know your name, and you do not know mine. We are two detached fragments of human society appositely placed in a Pullman section, impelled by the social instinct and chaperoned by a corporation. All the elements are modern. Can not you see the very essence of romance in the situation?”
“On the contrary it appears to me as quite realistic. It all might happen any day. I shall go on happening to some one, and you to someone else, every day.”
“I see; it is realism because it will not end anywhere in particular.”