From the little ante-room she passed into the larger chamber. Here, for the first time, she felt chilled; she seemed so alone. She was sure she felt a ghost whisper near her. Her feet slipped on the wet earth. On the further side of the tomb she saw upon the ground an urn, on which rested a skull. By the shape of the urn and by the arrangement of the ornaments above it Elsa knew that it contained the ashes of a warrior. A drop of water splashed down from the ceiling and aroused her. She held her torch aloft. She looked unbelievingly at the roof. Then she walked slowly around the room, wonderingly, feeling and scrutinizing the walls.
"Dolores!" she called, "come quick!"
Dolores was not long in coming.
"And here is also what should be the source of untold wealth to the discoverer," Elsa was murmuring. "Dolores, do you see that green, that dull gray? How it shines? Don't you know, Dolores? It's jade, royal jade, Dolores!"
—Dorothea Knoblock.
II. The Society Story
What the society story is
Society stories are those non-consequential narratives of modern fashionable life which have in their very lightness their sole excuse for being. They are set up as only partial reflections of the actual. Since their chief purpose is to please, they have no studied realism in them. All things intense and unattractive are omitted. If trouble appears, it is but as "sweet bells jangled out of tune and harsh," as one of their authors might promptly quote, and everything is brought to harmonize with everything else at last. Richard Harding Davis for his "Van Bibber" tales seems to have found a wide public.
The pastoral romance
An older representative of the society story is the pastoral romance, once a very popular form of the love tale. In it we have a picture of country life, but it is not the hard, toil-beleaguered life of the real peasant. It is the imaginary out-of-doors living-for-a-few-days of the courtier who masquerades as a shepherd and sits cavalierly on a grassy bank with a golden crook in his hand, sighing out his heart in silvery madrigals. His lady-love is no ordinary milk-maid, but a courtly princess on vacation. In this romantic land of shepherd loves, nothing realistic enters. The talk in even the first examples is philosophic and in the later becomes euphuistic as well. The critics maintain that the pastoral romance as a type does not go more than ten years back of the middle of the fourteenth century, although we have "Aucassin and Nicolette" of the thirteenth and "Daphnis and Chloe" of the fifth. The prime fact of the history of the pastoral romance as a society story is that it grew up as a revolt against the licentious realism of the Italian novellieri. The "Arcadia" by Sannazaro, written about 1500, is the book that made the epoch and established the rule for pastoral romance in all languages. Sannazaro took what had been foreshadowed by Boccaccio in the "Ameto" in 1340, and, enriching it with elements derived from Theocritus and Virgil, created the "perfect" example. From Sannazaro, Sir Philip Sidney borrowed the spirit, many episodes, and part of the name for his notable combination of prose and verse—the "Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia." Shakespeare, too, derived much from this important Italian book. For one thing, he took the name Ophelia; for another, his charming society pastoral drama "As You Like It" goes historically back to Sannazaro's "Arcadia" for its lyrics, out-of-doors courting, its real shepherds, its obvious love of nature, its touch of magic, and its wholesome morality. The lack of allegorical significance is also straight example from Sannazaro; but the love chain, the disguised shepherd princesses, the humorous element in connection with the coarse shepherds, a touch of adventure, and the cavalier tone are of later Spanish and English contamination, immediately through Lodge's prose romance "Rosalynd," and more remotely through Greene's three pastorals—"England's Mourning Garment," "Menaphon," and "Pandosto,"—and through Cervantes's "Galatea" and Montemayor's "Diana," and Ribeyro's Portuguese "Fragments."