“I like your fable well enough,” I said. “I should reward you by telling another. But it would be a pity to spoil by any attempt at the antithetical the fine neutral effect of your picture. You see, if nothing more happens, it is realism. If they marry after all, it is romance. Do you know that I sometimes have thought that life is so much colored by art that some people are afraid to let matters turn out happily at the end for sheer dread of being romantic. After all, marriage is very romantic. It is so romantic that romance chooses it for the finale, for the supreme reward; while realism every day is insisting that it shall be the dreadful thing that has happened before the curtain goes up. Yes, I know that realism marries too, but shamefacedly, with a reservation. A realistic marriage is as intensely qualified as an emotion by Henry James. You may not discern the string that is attached to it. But it is there. The author likes to leave that reservation rankling in your mind. I love thorough-going romance for one thing: its habit of not annoying you with qualifying elements. It likes to stir things up prodigiously, but it isn’t mean about it. It doesn’t describe a lovely scene and then temper the sentimentality of the moment by having the gardener’s wheelbarrow under the window creak maddeningly. It not only doesn’t mate a little, slope-shouldered hero and a tall heroine with freckles, but it exhibits from end to end that antipathy to what really has happened which is characteristic of all enduring art.” “You are saying that as if you actually meant it. My suspicion is that your ardor is incited by the spectacle of a woman defending realism. A man likes his heroines to be romantic, that is to say, sentimental. The traditional attitude of a woman _is_ sentimental. The whole structure of a man’s scheme is based upon that assumption. Man doesn’t like to see woman without awe. He doesn’t like to see her belittle the tragedy of life or to hear her say in the presence of comedy, as Stevenson said of his ‘Prince Otto,’ that ‘none of it is exactly funny, but some of it is smiling.’ Yet in spite of your prejudices, I am much afraid that the American girl is a realist. If she consents to glance at romance it must be romance leavened by satire.” [Illustration]