"I was a soldier in the French army. Oh! no glory—just drudgery. Very good society though: I still believe my corporal was an Austrian bishop. We were on detachment in the desert, and of course English books weren't to be had. Besides, some of the lads from Alsace were eager to learn, and it seemed a chance before I forgot it myself. I had met all sorts of strange characters, and began to try and set them down as I remembered them. Then it was only a step to putting them in new situations and figuring out how they'd make good. And then—and then—it seemed to me I made a discovery."
He stopped, a little agitated, filled his lungs with smoke, and emptied them before he spoke again. Althea sat quite still.
"Go on, please," she said in a low voice.
"In all the stories I had read the character seemed to start, full-fledged, on the first page. All the action of the book develops it and shows it up. Now that might be literature, but it wasn't life. What was the reason? Not a mistake; because the best men do it. No. But I think unconsciously they are following the line of least resistance. They start the first chapter under a disadvantage: with the last one in their heads. And they even get praise for preserving the unities—the unities!—of life! What a lot of guessing it would save! I ended by believing there's no such thing as a consistent character at all. There's something we hang our convictions on as we hang clothes on pegs, but all the rest is just things happening—things happening—things happening. And in the intervals"—he laughed again, "as much character as you like to indulge in: as much as you feel you can stand yourself. Am I tiring you?"
"Oh, no!"
"Take my book. You've read it through?"
"And through again."
"What's Patty Holt? Only a ranch-woman who broils, and bakes, and washes, and irons, and has wandering loves. What's her husband? An Indian trader, who holds up trains and has views on the revision of Hamilton's masterpiece, the Constitution of the United States. Neither of them know either how good or how bad they are. Conviction for him would come with the rope round his neck, and for her when the Ashplant Vigilance Committee gave her twenty-four hours to bisect the state boundary line at right angles."
"She'll be compared with Madame Bovary, you know."
"Very unfairly, then. Emma Bovary is a romantic-minded woman set amid prosaic surroundings, and Holt's wife is a commonplace woman set in romantic ones. What's wanting to romance? Her lovers ride and kill. I suppose if they rode—what's the word—destriers instead of cow-ponies, and carried two-handed swords instead of thirty-thirties, they'd be legitimate subjects for the most full-blooded cap and sword romance. And there was—I mean there is—violent and horrid death at hand any time the Ute bucks lift a demijohn of fifty overproof Peach Bloom Rye going up to a mining camp. No, what weighs them both down is just the sordidness of the transplanted civilization around them, and when the crash comes all they have to turn to is the little meeting-house God of their youth, which the woman has outgrown unconsciously during her emotional experiences."