"Oh, Bertram," breathed Eunice as she glided into his arms, "if Ernest knew, what would he think?"
At this point of my story I admit that I was held up. I myself couldn't help wondering how Ernest would regard the situation. He was a perfectly good husband and, personally, I preferred him to Bertram the lover. I might get unpopular with my readers, however, if they suspected this, so I continued:—
"Ernest can never appreciate you as I do, dearest," Bertram whispered hoarsely; "he is cold, hard, indifferent—"
Again I paused. If Eunice had been the really nice girl I meant her to be she would have asked Bertram what on earth he meant by saying such things about her husband, and would have told him the shortest cut to the front-door. In which case she might never have got into print.
The fact is the poor heroine of fiction has a hard time of it nowadays. Someone ought to write a treatise on "How to be Happy though a Heroine," or uphold her cause in some way. Twenty-five years ago she lived in a halo of romance. Her wooers were tender, respectful and adoring; she was never without a chaperon. Her love-story was conventional and ended in wedding bells. To-day—just see how her position has altered. Generally she begins by being married already. Then her lover comes along to place her in awkward predicaments and put her to no end of inconvenience, very often only to make her realise that she prefers her husband after all. Or, on the other hand, the modern writer does not mind killing off, on the barest pretext, a husband who is perfectly sound in wind and limb and had never suffered from anything in his life until the lover appeared. The poor girl will tell you herself that it isn't natural.
Then there is the compromising situation. Magazine editors clamour for it—in fiction, I mean. We find the heroine flung on a desert island, with the one man above all others in the world that she detests as her sole companion. It is rather rough on her, but often still more rough on other people, as it may necessitate drowning the entire crew and passengers of a large liner just in order to leave the couple alone for a while to get to know each other better. And not until they find that they care for one another after all does the rescue party arrive. It will cruise about, or be at anchor round the corner, for weeks and weeks, so that it can appear on the horizon at the moment of the first embrace. This situation is so popular at present that it is surprising that there are enough desert islands to go round.
Again, the lonely bungalow episode is pretty cheerless for the heroine. She accepts an apparently harmless invitation to spend a week-end with friends in the country. When she arrives at the station there is no one to meet her. After a course of desert islands this ought to arouse her suspicions, but she never seems to benefit by experience. At the bungalow, reached in a hired fly and a blinding snowstorm, she finds the whole household away. The four other week-end guests, her host and hostess and their five children, the invalid aunt who resides with the family, the three female servants and the boot-boy who lives in—all have completely vanished. The only sign of life for miles is the hero standing on the doorstep looking bewildered and troubled, as well he might, for he knows that he must spend the night in a snowstorm to avoid compromising the heroine.
And when the family return next morning and explain that they went out to look at the sunset, but were held up at a neighbour's by the weather, nobody seems to think the excuse a little thin.
The heroine can never hope for a tranquil existence like other people. I read of one only recently who, just because she strongly objected to the man her parents wanted her to marry, was flung with him on an iceberg that had only seating capacity for two. And when the iceberg began to melt—writers must at times manipulate the elements—it meant that she must either watch the man drown or share the same seat with him. The rescue party held off, of course, until the harassed girl was sitting on his knees, and then received the pair as they slid down, announcing their engagement.
What do I intend to do with Bertram and Eunice? I am undecided whether to place them in the vicinity of a volcano, which, unknown to Bertram, has eruptive tendencies, or to send them up in an aeroplane and break the propeller in mid-Atlantic just as the rescue party (including the husband)—What? Do I understand anything about aeroplanes? Certainly not; but I know everything about heroines.