Maud however was full of vagueness. "What great fact?"
"The fact of a relation. The adventure's a relation; the relation's an adventure. The romance, the novel, the drama are the picture of one. The subject the novelist treats is the rise, the formation, the development, the climax and for the most part the decline of one. And what is the honest lady doing on that side of the town?"
Mrs. Dyott was more pointed. "She doesn't so much as form a relation."
But Maud bore up. "Doesn't it depend again on what you call a relation?"
"Oh," said Mrs. Dyott, "if a gentleman picks up her pocket-handkerchief—"
"Ah even that's one," their friend laughed, "if she has thrown it to him. We can only deal with one that is one."
"Surely," Maud replied. "But if it's an innocent one—"
"Doesn't it depend a good deal," Mrs. Dyott asked, "on what you call innocent?"
"You mean that the adventures of innocence have so often been the material of fiction? Yes," Voyt replied; "that's exactly what the bored reader complains of. He has asked for bread and been given a stone. What is it but, with absolute directness, a question of interest or, as people say, of the story? What's a situation undeveloped but a subject lost? If a relation stops, where's the story? If it doesn't stop, where's the innocence? It seems to me you must choose. It would be very pretty if it were otherwise, but that's how we flounder. Art is our flounderings shown."
Mrs. Blessingbourne—and with an air of deference scarce supported perhaps by its sketchiness—kept her deep eyes on this definition. "But sometimes we flounder out."