“Oh, you tell me!” urged the reporter persuasively.
“All right, I’ll tell you that the only story that you’re going to be able to interest every human being in, from the President of the United States to the gentleman who takes away the ashes, is a good murder story. It’s the one universal solvent. The old lady from Dubuque will be at it the first thing in the morning, and the young lady from Park Avenue will be at it the last thing at night. And if it’s a love story too, you’re lucky, because then you’ve got the combination that every really great writer that ever lived has picked out to wring hearts and freeze the marrow in posterity’s bones.”
“Oh, come! Aren’t you getting just a dash over-wrought? Every great writer? What about Wordsworth?”
“Oh, pooh!” said the red-headed girl fiercely. “Wordsworth! What about Sophocles and Euripides and Shakespeare and Browning? Do you know what ‘The Ring and the Book’ is? It’s a murder trial! What’s ‘Othello’ but a murder story? What’s ‘Hamlet’ but five murder stories? What’s ‘Macbeth’? Or ‘The Cenci’? Or ‘Lamia’? Or ‘Crime and Punishment’? Or ‘Carmen’? Or——”
“I give up,” said the reporter firmly—“or, no, wait a moment—can it be that they are murder stories? Quite a little reader in your quiet way, aren’t you?”
The red-headed girl ignored him sternly. “And do you want me to tell you why it’s the most enthralling and absorbing theme in the world? Do you?”
“No,” replied the reporter hastily. “Yes—or how shall I put it? Yes and no, let’s say.”
“It’s because it’s real,” said the red-headed girl, with a sudden startling gravity. “It’s the only thing that’s absolutely real in the world, I think. Something that makes you reckless enough not to care a tinker’s dam for your own life or another’s—that’s something to think about, isn’t it?”
“Well, yes,” said the reporter slowly. “Now that you put it that way, that’s something to think about.”
“It’s good for us, too,” said the girl, “We’re all so everlastingly canny and competent and sophisticated these days, going mechanically through a mechanical world, sharpening up our little emotions, tuning up our little sensations—and suddenly there’s a cry of ‘Murder!’ in the streets, and we stop and look back, shuddering, over our shoulder—and across us falls the shadow of a savage with a bloodstained club, and we know that it’s good and dangerous and beautiful to be alive.”