The only thing in that which sounds like human speech is the blunder in the use of “than,” which I suspect is an unintentional blunder on the part of the author. The speech is no more appropriate to the given character in the given place than a sentence out of Macaulay’s essays. The most ingenious plotting could not entice a discriminating reader beyond that dead line of empty words, for they are proof enough that the author himself does not know his heroine’s character. To be sure, dialogue in novels cannot be “natural as life,” for actual conversation taken down word for word is diffuse and hard to read. The conversations in books must sound natural, appropriate to the place, the time, and the character of the person whom the reader is expected to believe in. There cannot be any rules for making conversation; if there are any rules they are for the novelists to study, not for the reader. The reader only knows whether the speeches sound right or whether the author is cheating him by passing off as talk mere words which the author strung out on paper and did not hear with his inner sense from the lips of his character. In the same book there is a description which I will quote, if I can resist the temptation to parody it: “The house nestled amid the verdurous shade of immense trees; to the left of the wooded park were sloping lawns dotted here and there with beds of the most exquisite flowers, which in contrast to the old weatherbeaten house greatly enhanced the beauty of the scene. Inside the house the utmost good taste prevailed from the antique colonial hatrack in the front hall to the handsome, but simple furniture of the parlor, in one corner of which on a sofa that was a cherished heirloom, a young girl might have been seen sitting engaged in embroidering a fine piece of linen. She was beautiful with large dark eyes and a luxuriant mass of richest brown hair,” and so on. Except for the poor fun of making sport of the author no one with a sense of humor will read beyond that. The author himself cannot see the place he would present to his reader’s eye. Description, which we have chosen to regard as the third element of fiction, must aid the imagination to realize the events and the people or it is worse than ineffectual. The novelist whose story is “dotted here and there” with descriptions which really “enhance the beauty” of his story is to be numbered among the immortals.