I mention the four heroines of a former period, Valerie, Becky, Emma, Anna, not because they are all disagreeable, but because they are my pets in fiction. Thoroughly disagreeable girls are Hedda Gabler, Mildred Lawson, and Undine Spragg. Of course, in a certain sense old Wotan Ibsen is the father of the latter-day Valkyrie brood. The "feminist" movement is not responsible for them; there were disagreeable females before the flood, yet somehow the latter part of the last and the beginning of the present century have produced a big flock in painting, music (Richard Strauss's operas), drama, and literature. Hedda boldly carved out of a single block stands out as the very Winged Victory of her species. In her there is a hint of Emma Bovary; both are incorrigible romanticists, snobs, girls for whom the present alone exists. She is decadent inasmuch as her nerves rule her actions, and at the rising of the curtain her nerves are in rags. Henry James finds in Ibsen a "charmless fascination," but by no means insists on the point that Hedda is disagreeable. Nor is he so sure that she is wicked, though he admits her perversity. The late Grant Allen once said to William Archer that Hedda was "nothing more nor less than the girl we take down to dinner in London, nineteen times out of twenty," which, to put it mildly, is an exaggeration. The truth is, Hedda is less a type than a "rare case," but to diagnose her as merely neurasthenic is also to go wide of the mark. Doubtless her condition may have added bitterness to her already overflowing cup; nevertheless Hedda is not altogether a pathological study. Approaching motherhood is not a veil for her multitude of sins. How soon are we shown her cruel nature in the dialogue with devoted Thea Rysing, whose hair at school had aroused envy in Hedda! She pulled it whenever she got a chance, just as she pulled from its hiding-place the secret of the timid Thea. Simply to say that Hedda is the incarnation of selfishness is but a half-truth. She is that and much more.