There is likewise a disgraceful old Peer who tells naughty stories, but who is good at heart; and one person so very rude that the wonder is who invited him. Occasionally a slangy girl is included, and a clergyman, who takes the heroine aside and talks sense to her, flavoured with epigram. All these people chatter a mixture of Lord Chesterfield and Oliver Wendell Holmes, of Heine, Voltaire, Madame de Stael, and the late lamented H. J. Byron. “How they do it beats me,” as I once overheard at a music hall a stout lady confess to her friend while witnessing the performance of a clever troup, styling themselves “The Boneless Wonders of the Universe.” The synopsis added that: “Ursula Bart, a charming and unsophisticated young American girl possessed of an elusive expression makes her first acquaintance with London society.” Here you have a week’s unnecessary work on the part of the author boiled down to its essentials. She was young. One hardly expects an elderly heroine. The “young” might have been dispensed with, especially seeing it is told us that she was a girl. But maybe this is carping. There are young girls and old girls. Perhaps it is as well to have it in black and white; she was young. She was an American young girl. There is but one American young girl in English fiction. We know by heart the unconventional things that she will do, the startlingly original things that she will say, the fresh illuminating thoughts that will come to her as, clad in a loose robe of some soft clinging stuff, she sits before the fire, in the solitude of her own room. To complete her she had an “elusive expression.” The days when we used to catalogue the heroine’s “points” are past. Formerly it was possible. A man wrote perhaps some half-a-dozen novels during the whole course of his career. He could have a dark girl for the first, a light girl for the second, sketch a merry little wench for the third, and draw you something stately for the fourth. For the remaining two he could go abroad. Nowadays, when a man turns out a novel and six short stories once a year, description has to be dispensed with. It is not the writer’s fault. There is not sufficient variety in the sex. We used to introduce her thus: “Imagine to yourself, dear reader, an exquisite and gracious creature of five feet three. Her golden hair of that peculiar shade”—here would follow directions enabling the reader to work it out for himself. He was to pour some particular wine into some particular sort of glass, and wave it about before some particular sort of a light. Or he was to get up at five o’clock on a March morning and go into a wood. In this way he could satisfy himself as to the particular shade of gold the heroine’s hair might happen to be. If he were a careless or lazy reader he could save himself time and trouble by taking the author’s word for it. Many of them did.